


1325 Commonwealth

by Guede



Series: Commonwealth [1]
Category: Aerosmith - Fandom, Rock Music RPF, Steven Tyler (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crack Treated Seriously, Dysfunctional Relationships, Getting Together, M/M, Past Drug Addiction, Rehabilitation, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:54:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beach houses, magnetic poetry, New York ramen, lasers, and trans-Atlantic YouTube dissing are the building blocks of legend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1325 Commonwealth

**Author's Note:**

> 1325 Commonwealth was the address of Aerosmith’s communal Boston apartment during their early days. Basic premise is that one of Steven Tyler’s earlier bands broke out first and the Jam Band show at the Barn never happened, and modern technology provides many more non-chemical excuses for Tyler to tune out. But Tyler and Perry being what they are, eventually they were going to get together. For LJ user tall_tree, who first suggested Penelope chasing Pepé Le Pew.

_TYLER: There was a lot going on at the time. My health issues, the band’s line-up was in flux, just a lot of other plates spinning in the air. So at first I didn’t really notice him.  
PERRY: Basically, Steven’s really fucking dense sometimes._

Ray brought him home. He looked vaguely familiar from the get-go, but Steven didn’t place him till Hamilton popped his head out of the kitchen, tried to pop his eyes out of his head, and then gave the scowling newcomer a hug tight enough to bend the guitar case under the man’s arm. “It’s Joe Perry!” Hamilton said in a tone of wonder.

“Oh. Oh, yeah, he’s from Sunapee too, isn’t he?” Joey said.

A couple things clicked together in Steven’s head. Elyssa, except he’d thought he’d heard through friends that she’d hopped on back to London, and also great fries, he thought wistfully. And then that reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since the last time he’d had breakfast, _maybe_ yesterday, and he was fucking starving and he went back to scrounging the fridge. Shoved over the empty milk carton, stared for a second at what looked like a baggie of withered pot but was probably doomed parsley in the back, and then sighed, holding onto both sides of the fridge and hanging his head. “Did you motherfuckers eat all the fucking—”

“Hey, well, we can’t all be hotshots with tons of cash rolling in through the door,” Joey muttered.

“Fuck you, Kramer.” Steven dove into the bottom shelf again, hoping against hope that he’d somehow missed a scrap of salami, hell, even a rotten egg. But nothing. “Jesus Christ, there are no tons of cash, yet I buy the goddamn food way more times than it’s my turn. The least you fuckers could do is leave me something when I get home.”

Hamilton and Perry were talking in the front room with some of the girls who’d come over, and Joey was wandering in that direction too, not paying attention to a damn thing Steven was saying. Ray came the opposite way, giving Steven an absent punch on the shoulder and half a ham sandwich. It had bite-marks but Steven took it. Plopped his ass down right there in front of the open fridge—it was still fucking summer—and started eating it while Ray rattled on about running into Perry at one of the local open auditions and realizing they’d both grown up in the same place, even if they’d never really run in the same circles, and Perry needed a place and blah blah blah Steven you _fucker_ somebody’s gotta share with you.

“Do not,” Steven snapped. He started to go on, realized that Ray was still gaping at him and sighed. Yeah, this new sober all the time thing was weird to him too, but it’d been three weeks since completion of rehab. They could stop looking at him like he hadn’t been able to speak coherently before. “And Don wasn’t my fault. I love the man, but if he wants to cut it in the business, he’s gonna have to take one for the team once in a while.”

“Steven, you sat on him and threatened to mash his face in with the ash-tray.”

Okay, true, but Don had been acting like a dick. And Ray knew that, and Ray had stayed, after all, because he fucking agreed with Steven on that one, and Steven was out of ham sandwich now and still hungry. Damn it. 

“Look, let’s go get some pizza,” Ray finally said. He glanced over his shoulder, then flashed a fold of cash he definitely hadn’t had in the morning. “I cut a couple deals on the way to the open call. C’mon, let’s get the fuck out before everybody else notices.”

Well, he didn’t have to tell Steven twice. They slid past the group in the front—one of the girls half-saw Steven and blinked hard, but then went back to smiling at Perry, who’d ditched the horn-rims Steven remembered—and were down the stairs before you could say Craigslist conman. In ten minutes they were ensconced in the pizza parlor around the corner and Steven was in melted-cheese greasy heaven.

“Don’s not coming back,” Ray said. Tactful for him, since he left out all the curse words and the headlock. “Steven, you gotta come to terms with that.”

“I am at terms with it,” Steven mumbled, washing down his current mouthful with a bunch of soda. “I am so fucking at terms with it that I am nirvana, Tabano.”

“Well, so we need another guy.” Ray helpfully pulled out another slice from the pie for Steven. “Perry seems okay.”

The second slice went a long way towards assuaging Steven’s stomach, which was still touchy as hell and which was, if he was being honest in his newfound sobriety, probably one of three things capable of freaking him out at the moment. He really should’ve eaten something before but some asshole had emptied out the snack machine at work and his snack drawer and Steven had been too busy running around trying to make the fucking single _happen_ and the online meal order service had gone down and sometimes it was just jacked-up. But okay. He was sort of full now, and that stabbing pain in his lower left side was feeling more like a cramp and less like that terrifying second when all the blood had started coming up. Okay.

“He says you two kind of met a couple times too, and even were going to play together,” Ray said. He looked at Steven, kind of almost grimaced, and rocked back and forth in his seat. “So anyway—”

“Ray, you don’t live with us and you don’t really share anything even though you eat over half the week, and you sure as fuck don’t split the rent,” Steven said. He propped his chin up on his hand and began picking the pepperoni off the remaining pizza. “Did Tom and Joey talk you into this?”

“No, actually, Brad.” Ray shrugged. “Well, I don’t know, maybe they all talked about it first, but anyway, Brad did the budget or something and since they lost the Greenwich gig, your paycheck’s not going to be enough. Look, man, they’re feeling guilty, okay? They know you’re footing the bills and working your ass off and they’re trying to help out.”

Steven rolled his eyes. “No shit.”

“Yeah, shit. I mean, they asked _me_ to talk to you,” Ray snorted.

He did have a point. Tom and Joey and Brad were still pretty iffy on Ray just because he acted like a bigger asshole than them, though since the OD they’d all tried to keep it pretty civil. And Steven did appreciate that. He really did. He knew full well they all could’ve fucked off when they’d heard his voice was out, but for some reason they’d hung around even though he wasn’t singing with them anymore. That was some serious loyalty for you.

But still. “So what the fuck does Joe Perry have to do with it?”

“Well, he’s done some session work and he said he’s got a regular call at the Douglas studio. It should be enough to make up for Don,” Ray said. He signaled to the waitress and she brought another soda for Steven, then stayed to flirt a little, talking about how she’d heard his single was dropping soon. 

Ray winced but Steven kept his head up, thanked her, and reminded himself that it was still his fucking song. Just producing.

“He said he knew you, too,” Ray tried. When Steven looked at him, the man looked comically relieved to have Steven’s attention. “I mean, I was honest with him. I told him he’d be rooming with you and he didn’t even blink.”

“But I don’t know him,” Steven said slowly, rubbing the side of his face. “Unless that was one of the blackout times—but yeah, I think he came by once, trying to talk up his band. They were going to play the Barn. But he was going for Elyssa, remember her? And finally got in her pants or something like that and it didn’t happen.”

“Oh, no kidding.” Ray sat back and thought about it. “Surprised that Hamilton’s so thrilled to see him. You remember, he was fucking _pissed_.”

Yeah, that had been one of the more epic Barn nights. Steven had shown up and for once he’d come _after_ the fighting had started; people were raging that they wouldn’t have a show and Hamilton and Pudge Scott had been flipping out trying to find Perry, and Steven had just really felt for them. Hamilton had been talking about trashing his bass, and not in a rockstar kind of way. So Steven had just gotten up on somebody’s car hood and started belting it out and Hamilton had gotten it and started rocking along—couldn’t play worth shit back then, but when the time had called for it he had stepped up and _rocked_ —and could you believe it but that was the day Steven Tyler had _stopped_ the riot.

Yeah. Back when he could sing.

“Well, none of my business if they still got shit between them or not,” Ray was saying, shrugging. “They can figure it out. But anyway, whoever the fuck, you—”

“Okay, whatever. If he’s still there when we get back, he can stay,” Steven said. It wasn’t like he was in too much these days anyway, and they could use another paycheck. He’d leave it up to the rest of the guys.

* * *

Ray took off after the pizza for a hot date, leaving Steven to walk back to the apartment alone. Brad was in the front room when Steven walked in, tuning his guitar on the couch, and their fourth dining table chair had its leg off again. When Steven picked up the leg, Brad shrugged and twanged his string.

“Way fucking sharp,” Steven said, tossing the leg under the piano. He sat his ass down at the keys and looked over the sheet music on the stand; for once nobody had riffled through it and it was still in the order that he’d left it. The chorus still needed work and he prodded a couple of chords. “So where’s Tom and Joey?”

“Joey left to get laid,” Brad said. He adjusted his tuning peg and twanged again.

Steven shook his head. “Flat.” Poked another chord, tried to modulate to the seventh and made a face. “I _thought_ Tom was still mad at Perry for ditching them.”

“Well, I don’t think it was totally like that, from what Perry let drop,” Brad said, retuning. This time it was good. He strummed a couple aimless chords before breaking into the intro to ‘Smoke on the Water.’ Then he stopped and laid his guitar flat on his knee. “So Ray talk to you?”

They’d all cut out the hard stuff after Steven’s little life-altering event, but Brad still smoked a bowl of pot every couple of days out on the balcony; the main doctor, a pro-legal weed advocate in her spare time, had said not to be around smoke too much just because smoke of any kind was going to irritate Steven’s throat, but she’d actually said pot brownies weren’t a big deal. Might even help out with the pain. Steven had thought about it, but he’d always been an all or nothing kind of guy and in the mood he’d been in at the time, he’d just—well, he couldn’t have reminders around. Just triggered too many flashbacks.

For a while he’d thought about even moving out for the same reason, but ultimately he couldn’t have left the guys. And anyway, that drill sergeant rehab therapist who’d ripped out their assholes had apparently come over and literally torn the place up helping them clean it out, and thankfully Gary the super was a great guy who’d donated some paint, and it did look a bit different. Enough, anyway.

“Yep.” Steven gave Brad another minute to say something, then gave up on finishing the damn chorus and went back to the bedrooms. 

Brad was a fantastic guitarist—and professional enough so he got right away why Steven was a perfectionist asshole, even if he didn’t always like it either, and much as Steven had felt like a traitor, getting him into Chain Reaction had been a brilliant move—but there were days you could get more words out of a dead guy than you could out of him. At least dead guys got obituaries and tombstones. Steven went to see for himself.

It sounded like Tom was in his room, but with a girl behind a closed door. The door to Steven’s room was wide-open and through it he could see a pair of legs, an ass and the hunched-over part of a back. Perry shoving something under the bottom bunk.

He straightened up when he saw Steven in the doorway. His hair was a couple inches longer than Steven remembered, going down past his shoulders, and curly as hell—Steven wasn’t sure if the man had gotten a perm or if he’d been straightening it before. His guitar case was against the opposite wall and there was a ratty duffel bag besides it, and then whatever he’d just put under the bed, but other than that, Steven didn’t see anything new.

“Hey,” Steven said.

Perry blinked. Maybe mumbled something, since his mouth moved a bit, but nothing Steven could make out. That was pretty much what Steven remembered.

“Hey, so we’re sharing, I guess,” Steven said. He had actually been using the bottom bunk since Don had left, but had changed the sheets yesterday because he’d thought he’d had a date to bring back and he liked to be classy once in a while. Anyway, like he really cared. “Look, I gotta crash, I have this launch meeting tomorrow, so…I don’t know, don’t fucking break it up with Tom or anything.”

So he hauled himself up into the top bunk and flopped over, Perry muttering something about words starting with L, and kind of fell asleep right away. Come to think of it, he hadn’t slept since the last time he’d eaten before the pizza either.

* * *

Steven wasn’t a morning person, but somebody threw his alarm clock against the wall and even that was going to get him out of bed. Nearly broke his fucking neck too, since he forgot he was on the top bunk and barely caught himself on the ladder. So instead he cracked a toenail, which bled and hurt like a bitch, and had to hop out over the jittery beeping remains of his clock. Somebody said something and he flipped them off over his shoulder. Then he caught sight of the time on the microwave and really cut loose—he’d forgotten to set his clock back for the fucking morning.

He booked it out of there, bleeding into his shoe, and got his ass ripped up as the first agenda item. The launch got pushed back because of conflicting drop dates with a fucking headliner and Steven threw a fit because he _knew_ his shit was better and his band was better and then because he remembered it wasn’t quite his band, not the way he meant _his band_ , and got carried out of the meeting room by Robert.

“Look, I know you mean well, and we’re fucking touched you’re putting it up for us, but you’re better on your feet than out, Steven,” Robert told him. “I’m getting you a cab.”

So Steven got home for lunch. Tom and Joey were around and Joey mimed a heart attack, which Steven just ignored as he flopped down on the couch.

“Bad day at the office?” Tom said.

“Single’s pushed back,” Steven muttered. He sat up to pull off his shoes and then got reminded that his broken toenail was now glued to the inside of his sock, which was stuck enough to his sneaker that they came off together, and now he was bleeding again. Fuck it. He tossed down the shoe and sprawled back on the couch.

“You’re bleeding, man,” said somebody. Oh, right, Joe fucking Perry. Standing over him with a plate of sausages and onions.

Steven looked at the ceiling. “You took my fucking bed, broke my fucking clock and now you’re doing color commentary. I mean, thanks for ditching your band, _man_ , ‘cause otherwise I would’ve had to snake them from you, but I don’t think that earns you talking rights around here.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Tom said in the background.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Perry said, in this deep, raw, growling voice. If Steven had been in the mood, it’d have been sexy. “Wait, what the fuck—I didn’t fucking ditch—”

“Oh, just fuck off.” Steven rolled off the couch. Stepped right onto his bad foot, stumbled nearly onto his face, but hey, that got him out of that punch or flail or whatever Perry was trying to do, and hobbled his way to the—fuck, couldn’t go to his bedroom.

Fuck, couldn’t get stoned. Fuck, couldn’t get drunk. He hadn’t eaten yet. Fuck fuck fuck fuck _fuck_.

He ended up in the bathroom, in the bathtub, sitting on the edge and running water over his toe. The nail had really gotten banged up, and a part that’d broken off from the rest had just gone into the flesh and he’d had to pull it out. Maybe he should go to a doctor too, except he’d kind of had plenty of doctors for a while and that was with the ongoing therapy and the check-ups on his gut and yeah. He’d just run cold water till he stopped bleeding.

“Um, Steven.” Tom.

“What,” Steven said wearily. “Look, I’m tired, I got bad news at work, I haven’t gotten laid since last week. Also, I thought you were mad at him.”

“Well, we asked him to stay,” Tom said. He leaned against the jamb and stared at Steven’s foot. “That looks pretty fucking awful, man. You want to go see a—”

“No.” Steven jiggled his foot a bit, since the water was looking like it was clearing up, but nope. Not done yet.

Tom sighed. “Okay, look, what happened was—”

“I don’t know why it’s your business, but my girlfriend had to go back to London for a family emergency and I went with her, and then I got into a band there and hung around for a while,” Perry said, shouldering in by Tom. He still had that plate of sausage with him. And a fork, and a napkin. Ready for a picnic, practically. “I told the guys, but it just came up last-minute. Couldn’t do anything about that.”

From the way Tom looked at him right then, that was still up for dispute, but it wasn’t something that was going to come out immediately. At least, not if nobody poked, and Tom caught Steven thinking and pulled one of his exasperated faces. “We all got over it,” he pointedly said. “No reason to get offended on our behalf.”

“Ain’t that the motto of the day,” Steven muttered. The other two looked like they didn’t know what he was talking about and he didn’t feel like getting into the nasty details yet, so he just turned off the tap and checked out his foot. He’d live. “Okay, fine.”

“Sorry about your clock,” Perry added abruptly. He held out the plate. “You eat yet?”

Steven cocked his head. “That’s not a clock.”

“Well, you can’t _eat_ a clock,” Perry said, rolling his eyes. He looked at Tom, who was starting to get amused, like the dick he was, and then back at Steven, like he wasn’t quite sure what Steven was. “Look, you want it or not?”

“Who made this shit? Kramer? Because the last time—”

“No, I made it,” Perry snapped.

Steven considered that. Then leaned it, smelled the food, and considered that. Then he shrugged, took the plate and fork, and tried a piece. Fucking _delicious_. “Hamilton, you could’ve just said the man is a motherfucking chef. Christ Almighty, as God is my witness, we’re never ever going to starve on moldy bread again.”

“What?” Perry said.

Tom just laughed. He patted Perry on the shoulder and then wandered off.

Perry hung around in the doorway. He was still wearing the ratty-ass jeans from last night, but had lost the shirt. Much better without the horn-rims, Steven thought absently. And really tasty sausage.

“So take it you like it,” Perry said after a couple more seconds.

Steven nodded vigorously, since his mouth was full and he was busy chasing a particularly fork-resistant chunk of sausage around the plate. He vaguely registered Perry edging into the bathroom. “Hey, so what band?”

“Oh, some guys that Joe Jammer knew. He’s Elyssa’s ex and they’re still kind of friends, and he showed me around over there. We almost had a record deal but it fell through and the band didn’t want to keep trying, so I came back,” Perry said. He was sitting on the toilet when Steven looked up.

“Sorry to hear that. So where’s Elyssa? Man, she’s a total fox,” Steven mumbled.

Perry pressed his lips together and rubbed his hands over his knees. He glanced at the door, then shuffled around on the toilet so he could throw his arm back over the top of the tank. “We broke up. She’s still in London.”

“Oh. Okay.” Well, if Steven ever did get around to trying to bang that one, he’d have to earn enough for a plane ticket first, so there Elyssa went to the backburners. The sausage finally succumbed to the fork and was promptly delivered to its fate. Then Steven wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and sat back, enjoying the feeling of a pleasantly full stomach. On the bright side, he had just gotten out of the office for the rest of the day, and maybe if he just pretended the whole morning hadn’t happened, he could get some work done on his own songs.

“I, uh, heard about what happened to you guys,” Perry muttered. 

“It wasn’t that bad. I mean, we all got to do rehab at the same place because the label’s cheap, so it was kind of like camp when you’re a kid. And anyway, I was out cold for some of the withdrawal so it wasn’t as rough for me. Poor Kramer broke two beds, I heard,” Steven said. He scraped his fork around the plate. Nothing was left except a couple curls of onion and a slick of sausage juice, which were just enough for him to make a picture of a cock and balls. A pretty good one—he started trying to remember whether he’d grabbed his phone on the way out, or if maybe he could borrow Tom’s and snap a photo. “And it was worth it anyway. I guess we weren’t that far into the drugs, actually, but even so, on the other side, it’s this whole different story. It’s just—”

“I heard about your throat,” Perry said.

Steven watched the tines of the fork wipe out his cool picture, and then watched the plate break up on the bottom of the tub. It had had a red glaze on it but the inside was white, at least before some of the bloody water still left around the drain got on it.

“Jesus Christ.” Perry was off the toilet and on his feet. “What the _fuck_.”

“I gotta go, asshole,” Steven said, getting up.

* * *

Well, Steven wasn’t going to get any writing done at the apartment. He wrapped a towel around his foot and got the fuck out of there. By then Joey and Tom were gone to rehearsals—not asking him along, even though he’d come home early, those lazy assholes. Needing a break from his bitching was basically saying that they didn’t want to put in the work to get it as far as it needed to go. 

And then he remembered they’d scheduled singer auditions for today, because he was—had been—going to be busy, and felt…well, he didn’t need to go, obviously. But that ruled out most of the people he normally would’ve called up, as well as his usual hang-out spot. Also, he couldn’t walk too well on a dish-towel.

He wasted some time at the record store, flipping through the latest LPs and shooting the shit with the clerks about hot new downloads, but eventually they kicked him out for not fixing his foot. So he went home. One of their downstairs neighbors, a cute girl taking sports therapy classes at the nearby college, talked him into letting her fix his foot and then they got into some action on the couch, but his stomach started cramping up and she didn’t have any food. So upstairs it was.

The other guys weren’t back yet, but Perry was crashed out on the couch. He didn’t so much as twitch when Steven came in, even when Steven accidentally dropped one of the new LPs he’d bought. Steven wasn’t so mad at him anymore and after a moment, he just shrugged, grabbed up the LP and went to see if the fridge had been restocked.

Nope, but somebody had bought potato chips and hot sauce and they were sitting on the kitchen counter. Steven spattered the chips with the sauce, ate them, drank some water, and then went back into the living room. Perry was still sleeping, his head thrown back over the arm, mouth hanging open, and Steven briefly considered dropping something in there.

Instead Steven got on the piano and leafed through his sheet music. He fingered a scale or two, then got really going. Maybe it was the shittiness of the day, but the chorus finally came together and he was going pretty good on the last bridge when there was a snorting and swearing and creaking behind him. “Good morning, sleeping beauty.”

“It’s fucking seven at night,” Perry said after a moment.

“Yeah, whatever, you know you’re not supposed to treat jet lag with sleep. You’re supposed to stay the fuck up till you get over it,” Steven said, scribbling down the last progression he’d tried. Then he put the pencil down and ran through the bridge again, scatting under his breath. Half a line came out of that and he wrote that down before he could forget it. “I’m really fucking hungry, man. What’s for dinner?”

“I don’t know.” Perry sounded like he was thinking about smacking Steven. “I got back a fucking week ago.”

Steven went through the bridge again, decided he didn’t like the line he’d come up with, or at least the end of it, and erased it. He started over from the beginning and came up with a better rhyme, and tried seeing what that looked like on paper.

“So you’re really writing pop stuff now,” Perry said, sounding now like he was sneering.

Sometimes Tom gave Steven that shit too, hardcore rocker and all that, but not so much since they’d all come back from rehab. The fucking upside of not totally being in the same band these days, Steven thought, and he really shouldn’t be surprised at how viciously that thought curled around but he was. He had to stop playing for a second. Then he shrugged and wrote down another line. “No, this one’s for the band. I don’t think I’m going to try selling it.”

Long pause. “It doesn’t really sound like your other stuff,” Perry said, kind of stiff, like his back was up and he didn’t know how to get it down, and maybe didn’t care. “Your first couple singles, they were more like—”

“We didn’t really know what the fuck we were doing with those,” Steven muttered. He pounded three chords and then caught himself, because this was supposed to be a melody, not a fucking rhythm section. “We switched out the whole fucking line-up except for Don and me and added Ray and had no idea what we wanted to sound like.”

“I kind of liked them. They had a groove.”

“It wasn’t the groove in my fucking head,” Steven snapped, and smashed his hands down on the keys. He stopped and stared at his fingers, then sighed and turned around. “You want something?”

Perry stared at Steven, his hair all in his face, but there was the sense that he was pissed off too. He just didn’t seem to know what he wanted to do with that, and finally he just dug his heels into the floor and slouched back. “What’s your problem?”

“My problem is Chain Reaction’s over and dead and buried, man, and I do a lot of things but necrophilia ain’t my style,” Steven said. He started to turn back, then didn’t and just straddled the bench, rocking back and forth. One of his fingers on his left hand was still hurting and he finally noticed that he’d cracked the nail there to go with his banged-up toe. “What’s _your_ problem that you’re into that shit?”

“I.” Perry pursed his lips a few times, then pulled himself forward. He pushed the hair out of the left side of his face and held it back while he stared at Steven. “Okay, I don’t know what the fuck you just said, to be honest, but I was just saying I liked your band, you know? And I didn’t know you wrote stuff like that. I mean, it’s not my thing, but—”

“It is my thing. It’s my father and my blood and the way I grew up, so if I want to write a fucking ballad, I’m gonna write a fucking ballad.” Steven sucked the blood off his finger, then ran through the chorus for ‘Hey Jude.’ “What, you’re gonna say the Beatles didn’t rock?”

“I didn’t say that,” Perry snapped. His eyes did their damnedest to burn Steven to the ground. Then he blew out his breath, a lot like Tom in one of his snippy spells, and yanked more of his hair out of his face. “You’re a fucking asshole.”

Steven leaned back against the piano, kind of half-listening at this point. His hand was wandering around ‘Yesterday’ now, and he honestly wasn’t really that upset. He was just too done in for that, but it was like that knee-jerk reflex. You hit him and he was going to go for your balls. “Yep.”

“What’s your problem?” Perry asked after another moment. More quietly, frowning at Steven. “I thought you all were…Tom said you’re still working with him.”

“Well, writing some songs, yeah, and a little harp and piano. I thought you said you heard about my voice.” Steven looked down and there was a pink smear across three keys. He sighed and pulled his sleeve over his hand, using it to rub off the blood. Then he wrapped the sleeve around his finger. “They’re thinking it’s not going to come back at this point.”

Perry looked uncomfortable as hell but he didn’t say sorry like ninety-nine percent of well-meaning motherfuckers did. He shifted his feet a couple times. 

“Anyhoo, I still have to do something, and the guys need somebody to sing, so we’re working it out. Probably we’ll have to change the band’s name, because it’s just…wrong otherwise,” Steven said. It was starting to get easier to wrap his mouth around. “But I’m still pretty fucking sore about it all. Not at the guys, but all the other shit. So, you know, excuse me if I don’t like people bringing it up.”

“Fair enough,” Perry said. He glanced around, putting his arm down, and his hair fell back in his face so he ended with peering at Steven through it. “You guys have any more food in there?”

Steven shrugged. “When’s the last time you looked?”

“Since I had to go out and buy enough for lunch,” Perry sighed. The grumbling tone reminded Steven of his parents and Steven snickered, and for a moment Perry looked as if he was going to take offense. Then he actually, maybe, smiled. Under that hair. “Look, I know I said I’d help out with money, but it was a fucking expensive plane ticket and I don’t start at the Douglas place till tomorrow, so I’m not going to get a paycheck—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m the sugar daddy again,” Steven said, sighing himself. “Well, come on, beautiful, my treat this time.”

He got up. Perry stared at him again, which Perry was doing an awful lot for somebody who’d grown up in Steven’s vicinity and who had at least heard of how Steven was. But the man got up before Steven could really do more than think about it, and well, it hadn’t been a big bag of chips. Rehab had cleared out a lot of the shit in Steven’s head but the fundamentals of himself hadn’t changed and he was, after all, pure appetite. Perry’s hang-ups could go in the trunk for now.

* * *

_KRAMER: Steven’s very physically expressive. You know, likes to grab you, always using you as a leaning post. That’s just the way he is. The rest of us were all used to that, but I guess Joe took a while to figure it out._  
_PERRY: I thought he was leading me on just to mess with me. There was a lot of, for lack of a better word, posturing going on at first. I didn’t know if he was just doing it on his own or if the whole band was behind it or what._  
_TYLER: I’m a friendly person and I act friendly. What else can I say?_  
_HAMILTON: Yeah, it was very apparent from the start who Joe was going for. At least if you weren’t Steven._

Robert had given him a lot more than he’d needed for the cab, some of which Steven had already blown on new LPs. But seeing as he didn’t also need to blow it on scoring these days, he still had enough left for some burgers. Some student group was also at the place, taking up all the seats, but the girls were pretty into Perry so they _could’ve_ made it work. Except Perry was out the door before Steven was even done paying, and since Steven wasn’t sure he wanted to run into the guys coming back from auditions, they ended up sitting on the back steps of the apartment building.

“It was a three-piece, me and bass and drums, and I guess we were going for a Peter Green Mac kind of set-up,” Perry said, licking burger juice off his fingers. “I don’t think it ever really worked the way we wanted. We never really got down who’d do the singing either. I did some, but I’m really a guitar guy.”

“Yeah, Tom said you were pretty damn good.” Steven squished his tomato back into the burger, then took a big bite and a swig of soda to wash it down. “Always said he’d like to get you and Brad up against each other, I guess, kind of whip it out and see which of you can get it down the longest and hardest.”

Perry’s brows jumped a bit, but he just nodded. “I’m still sorry about how it went down. It really just—Elyssa and I, we’d just hooked up literally the day before, and then she got the call and was really upset, and I mean, I didn’t think she should even be driving herself to the airport. I figured we’d get another shot at the Barn when I came back, except it just…didn’t go that way. And yeah, I probably should’ve called the guys before I got on the plane.”

“Weren’t you always driving her around anyway? I don’t think I remember seeing you without her,” Steven said. He felt like some fries and looked around for their bag, but couldn’t find it. Then he twisted around and saw it on the steps above them.

When he turned back, he caught Perry twisting his ass again, head tilted so he was hiding in his sheep-stack hair again. It must’ve been some fucking break-up. Though from what he knew of Elyssa, yeah, it would’ve been.

He felt maybe a little bad for the guy. And Perry had stopped poking him, so he offered Perry the fries first. “I still think you made better ones, but they aren’t bad.”

Perry blinked, then…actually smiled. His mouth curved and showed some pearly-whites and everything. “Shit, I hated that job. And you were such an asshole. You know I was always cleaning up after the messes you made, throwing shit around?”

“Is that why you were such a grumpy motherfucker when I came back that one time?” Steven said.

“Yeah,” Perry said, and look at that, the man was capable of laughing. He tossed his hair out of his face, then took a fry and stuffed it into his mouth, grinning around it. 

Okay, well, if he could be less of a moody son of a bitch and more like that, maybe he’d make a decent roommate, Steven was thinking, pulling the fries back. He got a couple himself and ate them and they sat there, not talking, just hanging. It wasn’t bad. Better than earlier, anyway.

Perry made a noise, like a grunt, and Steven thought the man wanted more fries so he tilted the bag. Except Perry had been looking at Steven, because he had to look down at the bag, and then back up, and he was serious again and staring again and he was probably going to say something when the door banged open behind him.

“There the fuck you are,” Ray said, seething. “Steven, tell these motherfuckers that—”

“Look, asshole,” Joey snarled.

Oh, Jesus. That was all Steven needed to hear. He looked longingly at the fries and what was left of his burger; beside him, Perry was obviously picking up on the vibe because he was back to glowering like somebody had just rained all over his parade. Then Steven gritted his teeth and turned around.

* * *

It thankfully wasn’t about singer auditions. What it was about, was the guys thinking Ray was being an asshole who wasn’t up to it or even fully committed, and Ray thinking that the guys were asking for too much. And both of them being right enough to give Steven a headache. At least he still got aspirin.

He talked it over with Brad later, when everybody had gotten their yelling and broken furniture and shit out of their system, because Brad never stuck his head over the ramparts but he also didn’t get so worked up about it that he couldn’t see the bigger picture. “He’s saved my ass more times than I can count.”

“And nobody’s saying that he’s not a great guy,” Brad said, diplomatically lying through his teeth. “But look, Steven, he—”

“He’s not good enough.” Steven kicked at the wall. “Yeah. I know. It’s—the sound’s not right. It’s not even the skill. He could work his ass off and show up to every practice early, and he and you still just don’t _gel_.”

Brad kept his mouth shut and let Steven pace around the balcony. Ray had gone storming off and so had Joey, but Tom was still around and every other pass Steven could see him in the kitchen, talking to—to Perry, he guessed. Nobody else was around.

“Well, it probably can wait a little longer,” Brad finally offered. He looked mildly pleased at managing to shock Steven. “We’re already, you know, going through a lot of changes, and not practicing that much. Honestly, I don’t think it’d be much good to bring this to a head right now. It’d be better to wait till things calm down a little and there isn’t so much else going on, and then maybe we can all look at this with clear heads. The big rush was because now we’re not earning, but since Perry’s here, that’ll be less of a problem. And I can probably pick up some session work too.”

“Okay. Okay.” Steven stopped walking around and looked over the rail. Then he pivoted on his heel and slumped back against the wall, moaning. “I miss getting _stoned_. Made this shit so much easier.”

“Also made you bleed out of every damn hole in your body,” Brad said, sharper than Steven had ever heard him. They were friends now, but he was the only one of them who’d joined up because of the label, and not because of some kind of childhood connection. It did make a difference. At least, it usually did. 

“I know,” Steven finally said. “I’m sticking to it, Whitford. But I’m just saying, and I can say that. It’s a free country.”

Brad shrugged, back to his normal noncommittal self. Then he winced as a sharp clatter came from inside. He looked over his shoulder, then at Steven. “Of course, this is assuming that Tom and him are cool, too.”

“Joe seems all right, at least on first impression,” Steven said. He didn’t hear any follow-up chaos so it was probably fine. “I gotta say, even hearing his side of the story, I’m not much into a guy who’ll dump his band like that. But hey, if that hadn’t happened, neither would Chain Reaction. And whatever he was like back then, I think I can take him right now.”

“Tom does say he’s good, no matter the personal things,” Brad said, musing. “Wonder if we should audition him.”

“Whatever.” It came out sharp. Bad choice of words on Brad’s part, and Steven just having his fill of bullshit for the day. “Look, I think I’m out, if nobody’s gonna die tonight.”

Brad looked apologetic, but just said—without any damn keywords this time—that he and the others were going to be out tomorrow afternoon too. Actually, he might have been able to say that straight up, since Steven didn’t mind knowing that he wasn’t easy to replace. But then again, that way lay dangerous waters. Maybe it was better to just stay out altogether.

* * *

Since the launch was delayed, Steven didn’t have any pressing reason to hit the office the next day. He could’ve fucked around the apartment, doing a shitty job of ignoring why everyone else was gone, or he could just up and go with Perry over to the Douglas studio.

Perry seemed a little surprised that Steven wanted to come, but he didn’t object. The guy was in a better mood, too, having tripped over Steven’s LP collection earlier and discovered that Steven had some pretty fucking amazing vintage Yardbirds pressings. They were stuck with public transport, but the time went quick enough since there was no more bitching about Steven’s pop tendencies. Apparently, Perry _could_ rattle on when properly motivated, and he had some fantastic stories himself about some session work he’d done with all the British rock gods he and Steven both worshipped.

That shut down once they got to the studio, weirdly enough. Perry’s connection for the job was a mutual acquaintance and, if Steven’s memory wasn’t too fucked, New Year’s Eve-stand of Steven’s, and he seemed pleased enough to see Perry. And had heard about Steven getting fucked over on the single launch, so naturally, he and Steven spent a couple minutes commiserating about the shitty side of the business while Perry filled out paperwork.

Or anyway, was supposed to be filling out paperwork, but when Steven finally came over to tell the other man goodbye, Perry had gotten as far as half a page and was looking like he wanted to convert the rest into a murder weapon. “You guys go back?” he said, curt and clipped.

Steven still hadn’t figured out what the hell was always apparently setting off Perry, but he was getting used—callused, maybe, was a better way of putting it—to that tone. “Nah, just since we moved down to Boston. He was working with a group in the next studio over and we hit it off on our smoking breaks. And okay, because you’re gonna hear the story from some wiseass, got way too drunk together at this holiday party last year, but we decided the whole walk of shame thing was bullshit and just wrote a song together instead. Shopped it to Arista, actually.”

“You were going after every girl in town up in Sunapee,” Perry said after a moment. Not grumpy, not accusing, but kind of…confused. He squinted up at Steven like he still had those nerd rims. “This just since you came to Boston too?”

“I _still_ go after every girl in town,” Steven told him in mock offense. “I don’t love women any less, and in fact, I’d say I love them even more, since I’ve got a new standard of comparison. But yeah, you could say I broadened my horizons a bit. Now that I’m clean, I’ve got more than enough love for the whole world.”

Perry blinked, then looked down at his papers. His shoulders moved in what might’ve been a shrug, if he’d shown any sign that he cared enough to make a gesture. 

“So anyway, I gotta run now,” Steven added. 

“Off to write another song?” Perry mumbled, all touchy again.

“It’s an honest living,” Steven said acidly. He turned around while Perry was still lifting his head, and just walked out. Fuck it. He didn’t have to be here and he sure as hell didn’t have to suffer Perry’s whiplash moods.

* * *

Angry did make it easier to write. Steven spent the next couple days alternating between the piano and the top bunk, working, earbuds jamming his current writing playlist into his skull. He finished up a couple of songs to shop around and got through what he thought was the first draft of his ballad, lyrics included. 

Perry was quiet, mostly. Once or twice he peered over the top bunk rail and pointed out that they were eating in the other room, or that Steven had somebody yelling for him, but that was it. And whatever else he was doing, Steven didn’t really give a shit. Not so much because Perry was an asshole as because Steven was just that deep into a fucking good writing groove, but either way, Steven didn’t need a distraction and Perry didn’t do anything that really offered him one. Which was fine by him.

* * *

Sadly, eventually Steven ran out of steam and had to come down. He stumbled out to the living room where everyone else was eating dinner, paused to take in exactly what that was, and then folded himself up into a space in front of the spread. Sort of. Somebody’s foot ended up under him for a second and he cracked his elbow on somebody else’s shoulder, but anyway, sustenance. Good.

“You smell like those bums in the park,” Joey said, handing him a piece of fried chicken. “Jesus, Steven, you take a shower since you holed up?”

“Mmmphfucker,” Steven said.

“That can’t be good for your stomach,” Tom said. “Unless you were making up all that.”

“Mmmphfuck you,” Steven said.

Brad told somebody to pass down the biscuits. The plate went over Steven’s head, which seemed as good a reason as any for Steven to stop attempting to sit and to just lie down. He propped his head up enough on his arm so he could eat without getting carpet in it, but that was about it. 

“Okay, we’ll just let you bleed to death from your ass next time,” Joey muttered.

“What happened?” said Perry, startled and loud.

Steven flicked a crumb of breading off his mouth, then looked up into Perry’s knee. He sighed and craned his head around, and everybody else was looking either like somebody had shoved them into a headlight or like they really didn’t feel like facing up to Perry, who actually wasn’t looking too pissed off. “Hey, I was eating. Somebody put like, bagels on the piano.”

“You’re welcome,” Tom snorted. He swirled his spoon around in a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese, then flicked the corner an exasperated-grandmother look. “So when Steven ODed on that bad cut, he apparently already had some kind of food poisoning going on.”

Brad muttered about whether or not they really wanted to talk about this while eating. They all ignored him.

“Shitting every hour for a day and a half, and hurt like hell. Look, you fellow fuckbrains, you tell me that dope doesn’t sound good right then.” Steven gnawed on the end of his chicken leg, sucking till he’d gotten the last scrap of fat to liquefy against his teeth. Then he aimed, squinted, and tossed it into the bucket of cast-offs in the middle of the group. He grinned and scrubbed at his mouth with his hand. “Anyway, how I got sick and what I ate in the first place, that—”

“—so he fucked up the bathroom so bad the super called in the health department to clean it out,” Tom went on. “There was _blood_ in the toilet and we didn’t know which end it was coming from, and he wouldn’t let anybody really check. Not that, honestly, any of us wanted to get too close. He was standing, anyway. We figured it was just a passing fuck-up again.”

“Then he fell down in front of the inspector. He looked like one of those, what do you call them, Ebola victims,” Joey said. “It fucked up his stomach, among other things, and now you have to feed Steven every four or five hours so that doesn’t rupture or whatever.”

Steven sighed and pushed up onto his elbow. “Fine, so now that we’re all up on the care and feeding of Steven Tyler, will one of you get me a breast? Who got paid, by the way?”

“Joe.” Tom handed Steven another piece of chicken. “So what was it this time? You got ordered to bring in a Top Forty again?”

It was a thigh. To which Steven didn’t take offense, except to wonder as to Tom’s eyesight because how could the man confuse thighs and breasts, and whether maybe Tom was doing that shit on purpose because somehow they were fighting again, and whatever. Steven was more for breasts in most areas of life, but he could go for a thigh now. “Not that I know of. Actually, I should check my phone.”

“Steven, if some guy’s pounding on our door at three in the morning because you swiped their master again, we’re just gonna let you get skewered this time,” Joey said.

“Skewered?” Perry repeated.

Steven’s weight-bearing arm hurt, so he switched to his other one. Then he put his head down again. On that side he had Perry’s knee to help out, so eating wasn’t as awkward. “They’re so supportive, aren’t they? You bring home the bacon and they offer to make shish kebabs out of you.”

Maybe that was jumping into it a little bit. It got quiet, except for that in-suck of breath from Joey that meant he maybe was going to go off on Steven. If it hadn’t stayed quiet for a good minute, since that meant people were pissed off and probably they’d have it all out later, but they were going to suck it down for now.

“Anyhoo, I wrote a couple shopwindow items,” Steven finally said.

“So we were thinking about putting up a YouTube video,” Brad said.

Steven bit down too hard and hit bone. He took what was left of the thigh out of his mouth, grimacing. Then, after some listening to his gut, threw that away. It wasn’t just hunger that could screw up his stomach these days. “Oh, got something going on, then.”

“Well, we think we sound all right.” Even though Steven wasn’t looking, Brad was obviously being strong-armed into being the talker. He was suffering, and man, was Steven fine with that. Petty, but whatever, his therapist could bitch him out later. “You’re the one with the—”

“What’d you write?” Perry asked.

“Oh, what? Oh, this poppy one, and then this other one is more of a rocker, like has that Detroit fuzz to it, more Jack White. If whoever the fuck gets it comes up with a decent riff, since I haven’t gotten that part,” Steven said, kind of on instinct. His throat got dry and kind of sticky, so he went to drink his drink, only to find his glass empty. He looked up to find out where the refill was and Hamilton was eyeballing Perry, like they had some shit going down again, and Perry was all raised brows and slouched shoulders right back, like what the fuck but I’ll throw down, fucker. All very macho.

Anyway, the soda appeared to be gone, but Joey had an unopened water bottle by him. Steven grabbed it and went back to mostly where he’d been, except for having more of Perry’s leg. Bony as hell, but still more comfortable than the floor, and Perry didn’t shove him off so whatever. If it came down to it, Steven was still the most pissed-off in the room, but Steven was going to try and be mature. Damn it.

“He’s probably pitchy as hell,” Steven muttered. Then he sighed and poked the bottle-cap around the floor. “Okay. Okay, fine, did you tape it yet?”

“No. He’s from out of town and was just down for the weekend, but he’ll be back next weekend,” Brad said. Slow and careful, leaning back, watching for the teeth to come out. “You can meet Sammy then.”

Steven didn’t answer that because he was trying to be mature. He wasn’t fucking mature yet so he wasn’t fucking committed. Goddamn fucking life. Goddamn throat. Goddamn shitty fucking heroin eating up his vocal cords and goddamn fucking addiction and goddamn fucking everything. All right, be positive, be constructive, at least he wasn’t totally out of the band. He was going to get veto on this. He needed to talk about something else. “So Douglas is fine with your sour-ass face?”

“What?” Perry said after a moment, blinking. He stared down at Steven. “You mean me?”

“Yeah, I mean, you were being a total shit the last I remember,” Steven said.

“You obviously got over it, man. You’re pretty much on his lap,” Joey pointed out, giggling like a hyena.

Tom flicked him a look and then checked out the mac and cheese like it was way more interesting than any mac and cheese could be, and there was all sorts of interesting shit in that but Steven wasn’t into it right then. He was full, and now that he was not thinking about that, yeah, he could use a shower. And maybe see if that toenail had fallen off yet. “It’s the least he could do for me, after last night,” he said, and struck a swoon, hand to forehead and all that. Then he pulled himself up and pecked Perry on the cheek. “Parting’s such sweet sorrow, babe, but gotta go.”

“ _What_?” Perry said. Huge eyes, frozen stiff, probably would’ve decked Steven if otherwise. God, Steven felt better.

He got his ass out of the danger range, then skipped off to the showers to the tune of rising bickering among the others. Now, that was what he liked to hear.

* * *

Freshly showered, toe half-healed and properly bandaged again, Steven had a mild feeling of concern about going back to his bedroom. But then he figured if Perry was really bothered, he’d just have moved out.

Perry hadn’t, and was stretched out on the bottom bunk with his guitar when Steven came in. He stopped whatever he’d been playing and tracked Steven around the room until Steven got to pulling on a shirt. “I thought that was somebody’s girlfriend’s thing.”

“I think it was,” Steven said, pausing to study the chiffon. Then he shrugged and tugged it down over his stomach. “Well, mine now.”

“So…those are all your clothes?” Perry nodded at the closet.

He’d put something like three new hangers in there. One had scruffy jeans folded over it, enough to make the plastic bow into a diamond, one had a pretty nice leather jacket, and one had, randomly, a grandfather silk tie. Okay. So far what Steven recollected on Perry were wrinkly buttondowns missing buttons on the top half and t-shirts, but okay, maybe the guy thought he’d get invited somewhere. His duffel bag was underneath and it looked like he had more clothes in there, and Steven almost bent to check that before he glimpsed his phone and remembered he needed to check that nobody was coming after his ass.

Since he’d gotten hauled out of the office, Steven had missed five voicemails, thirty-three texts and over a hundred emails. He sighed and sat down cross-legged to start going through them. Then he winced. “You are flatter than the flat asses benched up at a video vixen cattle call.”

Perry stopped torturing that A-string. “What?”

The texts were a bunch of bullshit, except for the one from Robert wanting to know if he’d gotten home fine. That one made Steven wince again. He texted the man back, adding a note that he’d maybe written another single so Robert wouldn’t call up his doctor to check on his rehab, and then moved on to the emails. “Your A. It’s flat. Other than that, that was kind of cool.”

“I left the tuner at the studio,” Perry said, and picked the string again.

Steven rolled his eyes to hide the pain and crawled over to the bed, thumbing at his phone in the meantime. He grabbed the neck of Perry’s guitar, ignored Perry’s obvious instant desire to break his neck, and held up the phone. “It’s called an _app_. You have those over in London, right?”

“Get off,” Perry said, pulling at his guitar. “Look—”

“Oh, for the sake of little choirboys,” Steven muttered. He let go of the neck so he could get up and sit on the bed, and then flicked that A-string. While Perry was getting offended at that, Steven twisted the string’s peg, flicked again, and then made a last adjustment. “I can so fucking tell you and Tom were in a band together. You both can’t tune worth shit. Now do that thing again.”

Perry looked up at Steven over his guitar, which he was clutching like it was the answer to his prayers. “What thing?”

“That thing you were doing, that riff. The one you just played.”

“I don’t _know_ what I was playing,” Perry snapped. “You interrupted.”

Steven looked at him. The man appeared to be serious.

“Jesus Christ,” Steven said, and rolled off the bunk. He hopped up onto his bed and turned onto his back, returning to his many, many emails.

“I’m not like schooled in chords and that, you know?” Perry explained to the underside of Steven’s bed. “I can’t tell you A-D seven whatever.”

“Okay, fine, you’re uneducated, tons of people have that problem and still manage to succeed in life with plenty of hard work and moxie,” Steven muttered. Most of his emails were angry with him. On the one hand, nice to know he was missed. On the other hand, God, people were such assholes. “Get a fucking recording app.”

“I just got here! I don’t have a phone, okay? The one I bought over there, it doesn’t fucking work here!” Perry whacked the bottom of Steven’s bed. “You fucking asshole!”

Steven looked at the ceiling. Then at his pissy emails. Then he turned over and pulled himself up to the gap in the rail for the ladder, and hung his head down. “Stop kicking my ass.”

“You’re an asshole,” Perry said.

“Well, because somebody’s got to get shit right so it sounds right, and how the hell do you get session work with that attitude? There’s more to music than just ripping it out, dumbass,” Steven snapped back. “Any idiot can do that. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page and all them, they don’t just crank it up.”

“Yo,” Tom said from the doorway. He offered up one of his manic grins when they both looked at him, then dropped it to look awkward. “Hate to break up the cuddles, guys, but…so, Steven, are we scheduling a practice or what?”

“Oh.” Steven pulled his head up. “Oh, that.”

Tom shrugged, glanced over his shoulder at whoever was hiding out in the kitchen, then nodded tightly. “We kind of have to call to tell Sammy whether it’s on.”

Steven pushed his face into his hand, then pulled it out. Then pushed it back in, but left a crack in his fingers so he could read through his emails. Which he didn’t want to do, but he didn’t want to talk about this even less, but…his emails were about his songwriting, and his songwriting was mostly about paying the bills right now and that probably ate him up more than anything else, to be honest, because fine, fine, get your ass out there however you could but _goddamn it_.

Fine. “Fine,” he mumbled.

“Thanks,” Tom said. Put a whole lot into that one word, credit to him. Still wasn’t much of a comfort. “So, well…carry on, I guess. Except don’t break anything. We don’t have anything in the bail kitty.”

“Okay, fine,” Perry snapped, and that got Steven looking up again. 

Actually, Tom had been eyeing Perry for that part, and Perry got the hairy eyeball a last time before Tom went off. “You two really all right?” Steven asked.

“Fuck off.” Perry punctuated the point with a really jagged, jangling stretch of notes.

Steven opened his mouth, then shut it and rolled over onto his back. He wasn’t going to leave, because it was his fucking room first, dipshit. And he wasn’t going to engage either, because that wasn’t helpful and…and Perry was still noodling around. Now in tune, more or less, but pretty aimless, boring shit and Steven suspected that he’d left his iPod on the floor.

He counted to ten and then sighed and turned over again.

“How much are those?” Perry asked. “That app, I mean. I was gonna get a phone, but then we didn’t have any food again, and so that’s going to have to be next week. Why don’t you people ever have food, anyway?”

“Because we’re a pack of rampaging cannibals.” Steven grinned at Perry’s face. “The app’s free. You have a laptop or anything? You can—”

“Elyssa got it,” Perry muttered.

Steven took that one and looked at it from a couple different angles, and still came up with fucking messed up. And coming from him. At this rate, hell, he might have to check out whether he knew anybody over there who’d give it to him straight, just out of sheer desperate need-to-know. “Okay. I’d lend you mine, but I got some virus a week ago and the techies keep telling me it’s still—oh, wait, we’ll swipe Tom’s.”

“What?”

“Gimme a second, he’s probably off on Terry anyway,” Steven said, shimmying down the ladder.

He came back with the laptop while Perry was still sitting up. Perry watched him drop it into Perry’s lap, take it out of sleep and then boot up the browser. Tom had reset the homepage again, undoing all of Steven’s hard work, so it was just as well that Steven was showing Perry the wonders of the Internet. He got the man an online tuner, set that as the homepage, and then got his iPod while he was at it. 

Back up in his bunk, Steven vaguely heard Perry say something through the earbuds. He garbled out some nonsense sound and Perry didn’t try again, so he figured they were fine. And, Steven sighed, back to work for him.

* * *

Going back into the label office meant having to sit through yet another lecture about professionalism, but they liked the second song Steven had written, which gave him hope that he might get off the pop bandwagon. Like he’d told Perry, his musical tastes were large and encompassed multitudes, but his abiding love was rock and roll and he didn’t get back to that nearly enough these days. Either with songwriting or with…with whatever he was doing now with the band, between his issues and the band’s sound sucking and everybody bitching ninety percent of the time. 

Ray dropped by on Thursday night to let them know he was out of town for the weekend, something about a deal up in Hartford. Non-negotiable. The ensuing argument was epic, not in a good way, and somehow Steven found himself in the street yelling at his best friend to shove it up his ass and take it out and to not bring it back, while those other motherfuckers hung out on the balcony. He couldn’t go inside for a while afterward and just sat on the steps till Terry wearily came out to tell him to stop moaning, nobody liked doing this either, and realized he actually just couldn’t pry his hand off the front step railing because of his gut cramping.

The doctor he got on that trip was a total bastard, right down to telling Steven he sounded raspy, could he please open up for a look. And then the asshole got upset about Steven getting upset.

“You threatened to skin him with a tongue depressor,” Joey pointed out.

“So?” Steven muttered, his throat aching, and went to bed.

His love life had been in a slump too, mostly due to his not having the damn time to even wave at the girls lately, so it was a little weird to wake up the next day next to long black hair. Then he heard the snuffle and remembered he had a roommate. And had apparently gotten on the wrong bed. And apparently his roommate had a fear of heights or something, because he hadn’t taken Steven’s bunk, even though the beds weren’t exactly sized for kings.

Perry woke up when Steven was trying to crawl over him. He rubbed his eyes, blinked, and then eeled out of bed after Steven, starting Steven’s day off with mild annoyance that anybody could still look that cool at this hour. “So I miss any murders after I left?” Steven muttered. “Any natural disasters?”

“They wanted to know if I’d sit in for Ray. I said I’m usually lead, not rhythm, and Brad said he’d be okay with switching to rhythm and they’d just try it out, what the hell,” Perry said, eyeing him.

“Yeah, well, long as you don’t take off for London.” Steven found some clothes, pulled them on, and padded out.

Perry came after him, still yanking on some jeans. “The fuck is that? I’ll sit in. I said I’d sit in.”

“Oh, heeeeey…okay.” Joey took a look at them, grabbed his breakfast and then hid in the front room.

“I’m just saying, last time I showed up for you, you weren’t around. And I’m just a little bit sore about assholes fucking off for unknown parts when people are relying on them right now,” Steven said. He found a bag of semi-stale bagels and bit off a chunk of one, only to choke it right out into the sink when the rough edges caught his throat. “Fuck.”

“Well, this is _different_ ,” Perry snarled. “Tom didn’t even give me this shit, and he was _in_ my band.”

“It’s my fucking band now, thanks to you, so fucking deal with that.” Steven spat a couple straggling bagel bits into the sink, then swallowed and grimaced. It felt worse in there than last night. They’d said be fucking careful if he wanted any hope and oh, Jesus, trying to hope. Even if he was back on the drugs, they wouldn’t cut that hurt enough.

Perry scuffed around behind him and Steven thought he’d left until the other man showed up at his elbow with a glass of milk. “You sound pretty bad,” Perry observed.

“No shit,” Steven muttered. He leaned over the sink and thought about hitting on the tap and sticking his head under it. Then he sighed and leaned back, and nearly knocked the glass out of Perry’s hand. “You planning to do something with that?”

“Maybe stick a banana in it. It’s healthy for your throat and digestion or whatever. I heard some guys at the studio talking about it. One of them has an ulcer that acts up once in a while.” Perry was looking everywhere but Steven as he said that, and between the rumpled bedhead and intense glower, he almost pulled off the uncaring act. “Do you have bananas?”

“Aside from moi, nope,” Steven offered. He laughed at Perry’s annoyed look, then hissed because that hurt too. “Shit.”

The other man glanced at him again, then poked around till it was definitive that they had stale bagels and nothing else. Then they stood there and looked at that glass of milk. Steven still had the bagel in his hand and he picked at it, then glanced at the bit he’d pulled off. Then dropped it into the glass. Perry opened his mouth, decided to mimic Tom’s exasperated sigh instead, and held the glass till Steven had stuffed it with bagel pieces.

Soaked for two minutes, they were mushy and kind of gross but went down without triggering Steven’s gag reflex. “This blows,” Steven said.

“Are you still coming?” Perry asked. Since Steven had the glass now, he was stuck fiddling with his belt-loops. And doing up his fly when he noticed he hadn’t done that yet. He hitched up his jeans on the left, scratched his right shoulder, and then picked a couple snarled strands off his stomach. “I mean, I’ll sit in if it’s cool. I just brought it up because I don’t think anybody figured out who was going to ask you, at least not last night, and we kind of need to decide before this Sammy guy gets here. Which is what, in an hour.”

“Good to know we aren’t just adding people without discussing it like the big, happy family we are.” Steven sucked up more bagel soup. “Those chickenshits.”

“Hey, it’s just trying to make it work,” Perry said.

“So how you’d feel about somebody changing your lead singer without telling you?” Steven said.

Perry blinked. He glanced off to the side, then pressed his lips together and moved his head from side to side. “Probably like I’d want to skin them with a tongue depressor.”

Steven laughed. Swore. Coughed, and scrunched his lip down on the cup rim so he could get some milk without bagel. “I never, never ever in a million years would’ve figured on doing this at all, let alone stone fucking sober. Fuck a duck, shit outta luck, okay, let’s get this shitshow going. I’ll get Hamilton, you get Brad.”

* * *

Sammy was the Sammy Steven would’ve figured it to be, if he’d been wanting to think about it. As it was, Sammy showed up and Steven spent about two seconds just hanging his jaw, and then another two seconds feeling a little sorry for the other guys.

They never got to playing. Sammy spotted Steven, wanted to know what the fuck was up since how many singers did they have, anyway, and you could see Joey’s back go right the fuck up. Steven got down on Joey, and justifiably, for the man’s sloppy playing, but he was never going to fault the guy for heart and soul. Or balls for standing up to full of themselves dicks.

So, ten minutes of yelling, of which Steven sat out because of having to rest his throat and all, and then Sammy went off to ‘go think about it’ while Brad chased him and Steven went off to get himself a new milkshake, and met a couple smokin’ girls, and well, eventually came back to the apartment.

“Well, that was a total fuck-up,” Tom said when Steven came in. He didn’t look as mad as Steven would’ve thought. Just exhausted and annoyed.

“Oh, so it wasn’t worth coming back for? I kind of figured when nobody texted.” Steven dropped off the half a chocolate cake the one girl had given him on the coffee table and then sat down on the piano bench.

Tom looked at the cake, raised his brows, and then just went with it. “You could’ve come back for Joe, maybe. We jammed some once Brad came back and told us Sammy really wasn’t into it, and it was sounding really good.”

“Didn’t wanna tell me?” Steven said. He’d had half an idea lying on the girls’ sofa, which he’d actually remembered, and he ran it out on the keys. Was okay, really needed a good riff, though.

“Well, you knew he was there,” Tom said, shrugging. His voice rose a little weirdly. He was looking at something behind Steven.

“I figured Sammy wasn’t coming back and figured it’d all just go down in flames for the day, like usual for us,” Steven answered, and then looked back.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Perry demanded. He looked like a thunderhead with hair.

Steven blinked. “I got laid. Why?”

Perry looked even more pissed about that. He exhaled sharply, then abruptly turned and stalked off, giving Steven’s piano’s leg a kick in passing. He ignored Steven’s half-shout about that—half-shout because _ow_ damn it, definitely needed another milkshake—and then the metronome Steven threw after him. Electric, so it just took a chip out of the wall, but would probably still work.

“The hell was that about?” Steven finally muttered, dropping back onto the bench.

“I guess he wanted you to stay,” Tom said. Slow, using his choosy tone, completely having some other conversation than the one they were having, but he was staring after Perry, not looking at Steven. And Steven still didn’t want to get into that one.

Oh, well. If Steven had to, he probably could go back and hit up one of the girls for the night. Bebe had friends in New York and had invited Steven to head up there with her sometime. No reason to kick over more hornets’ nests than anybody was making him.

* * *

They were supposed to have another singer audition right away, but couldn’t quite scrape up the money to rent the rehearsal space. Robert was off on tour, so Steven had to call up Peter, their manager—well, sort of, since whether he remembered they still existed seemed to depend on how likely he thought that Steven would show up in person if he didn’t call back—and ask him to help get another song sold ASAP. Brad picked up some session work too, so they’d probably make enough by the end of the month.

In the meantime, Brad and Perry were apparently jamming like motherfuckers, and Steven was supposed to see it and give his opinion on it. He was having better luck seeing his own asshole, because suddenly Perry was AWOL every time that Steven came around. “Well, I’m so fucking sorry I can’t make it home during regular business hours because I’m out selling the song that’s gonna pay for our space, but like he lives during regular business hours anyway. I haven’t seen him in a week and I’m sharing a bed with the guy.”

“You two got tight fast,” Tom said. He made himself a sandwich and then went to put the cold cuts back into the fridge.

Steven leaned off the barstool, grabbed the cuts, and then began peeling the slices off and eating them plain. “That had better be sarcasm, Hamilton. The guy’s got the look for sure, but because he really is a stone cold bastard.”

Tom’s brows jumped. Then dropped as he watched Steven roll up another slice of salami and slide it into his mouth. He offered Steven the bread, then the cheese—Steven took the cheese—and then settled back to eat his sandwich. “Hey, by the way, it’s good to see you interested in the band again.”

After a moment, Steven pulled out the half of the salami roll that hadn’t made it into his mouth. He wanted to talk and he didn’t want to have to chew through that first. “What, exactly, are you talking about?”

“Steven—”

“Because I am _always_ interested in the band. I live and breathe and feel the fucking band, all right, and I know you guys care too but you know what, I do care more and I’m gonna say that and you fucking know it’s true because you fucking well know I don’t have anything to do _but_ think of the goddamn band that I can’t goddamn _sing_ in anymore because—”

“ _Steven_ ,” Tom snapped, reaching over. He yanked Steven up against the counter by the arm, then jerked Steven down, then did it again so Steven breathed.

Wow. The world spun and Steven was sober. That was new.

“Look, it fucking sucks,” Tom said, more quietly. He still was holding onto Steven’s arm.

Steven put his free hand down on the counter. The swirls of the fake wood grain still looked like they were moving around it, so he went ahead and put his head down on top of his hand. “You have no fucking _idea_.”

“Okay. Okay, no, I don’t. But if it sucked to infinity, you wouldn’t be here. But you are. So it’s not so bad that you’re going to go, but you can’t just—you have to fucking show up again. You’re gonna have to get used to it being this way.” Tom’s hand moved up and down Steven’s arm, about an inch either way. Then it went up and patted at Steven’s shoulder. Awkward as well, and that stopped the moment Steven tried to breathe, honked his sleeve instead, and swore into the counter. “Oh…oh, come on. Steven.”

“I want my therapist,” Steven mumbled. He pressed his right eye down onto his wrist, then scrubbed around till his sleeve wasn’t wet. “I’m having a fucking panic and it’s reawakened my trauma and all anybody wants to talk about is how I’m being fucking mean to my asshole fucking roommate who’s hiding from me. I wanna talk about _me_.”

“Steven, do you actually want me to call them again? Because I love you, man, but I’m not gonna talk you through this. It’ll reawaken _my_ trauma.” Tom sounded like he was talking through his hands. He muttered to himself, then heaved a deep sigh. “Okay. Look. Just—just stop freaking out. I’ll drive you to the clinic, or to wherever, but just…just show up to our next practice. It’s getting weird without anybody yelling at us for fucking up, and there’s no way we’re gonna find somebody who can replace that.”

Against the dominant current of his mood, Steven snickered. He wiped at his face some more, then managed to ratchet his head up so he was looking at Tom’s chest. Then he pushed his fingers around his eyes some more. Might as well squeeze out all the tears before he bothered trying to clean up this mess. “What about Perry?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Tom said. “You know, to be honest, I’m not sure what his problem is with you. Sure, you left, but it did—it’s not like we planned to keep playing. It was pretty spontaneous. I mean, Joe basically just got fucking mad and started wailing on his guitar, and we got sucked into the groove. It’s not like you fucking stood him up or anything.”

“You sure you’re over that?” Steven asked, finally looking up.

Tom met his eyes for a moment, then snorted and looked down at his sandwich. He prodded the top with his finger and watched the bread slowly rise back to about two-thirds of the way. “Look, put it this way, I can play with him, and I can live with him. And I know him a little better than I guess I did when he left. I don’t know—I don’t know what you mean by _over it_ , but Joe always did shit his way anyway, and I wouldn’t have been friends with him in the first place if he wasn’t like that.”

“You sure _you_ don’t wanna talk to my therapist?” Steven said.

“Oh, God.” Shaking his head, Tom picked up his sandwich. “No, look, I agree, we really needed those sessions, but I think I’m fine now. I’m clean and I know what my goals in life are, and damn it, I am _not_ going back to that clinic for Joe fucking Perry. Steven, just take a break or something this weekend. You’re going nuts trying to sell this stupid song and if you wanna get into the therapy-talk, you need to stop compensating for…for…not being able to do things. Other things. That you used to do.”

Steven rolled his eyes, then began picking at his sleeve. The wet silk was sticking to his skin; no wonder girls carried tissues around in their purses, when their blouses were so shitty at this. “I love your consideration of my feelings, Tom, but…yeah. Okay. Call a spade a spade, and a fucking broken voicebox broken. The rest of my mouth isn’t broke, and I _am_ still in the band, and I’m not going to leave it. You’d have to kill me first.”

“Well, I don’t think we’re that mad at you this time,” Tom said dryly. He raised his sandwich nearly to his mouth, then put it down. “You never were just the singer anyway.” 

Bittersweet was coming to have a whole new meaning for Steven. He shifted in his seat, then propped his chin up on his hands and decided that he’d rather work on the chill-out part than keep figuring out whether or not he was into bittersweet. It didn’t exactly fucking matter if he was into it or not, anyway. “Come to think of it, Bebe texted me. She’s going up to New York this weekend and she _claims_ that Jeff Beck’s gonna do this little private show. She says she can get tickets for two of us at least. You know what, try telling Perry that if he’s a good boy, he gets to come.”

* * *

Two hours later Perry came into the bedroom. He stopped just short of the bed and Steven realized that once again, he’d flopped into the bottom bunk without thinking. Steven swung his legs off the edge, but before he could get any further, Perry sat his ass down next to him and stared so hard at Steven that the backs of Steven’s eyes began to peel.

“Tom said you’re gonna take me up to New York to a Jeff Beck show,” Perry said.

Okay, was that what Hamilton had said. At some point Steven and Tom were going to have to have a little talk about how to play the telephone game. Either that or Steven was going to start writing out his suggestions in bullet points for the man. “Yeah, Bebe, this girl I know, she got tickets and she’s got a car.”

“Oh.” Perry…looked strangely disappointed for a guy who worshipped Jeff Beck more than Steven did. Then he tucked his head down, rumpling one hand through his hair so it went over his face for a second. When he looked at Steven again, he was back to his ultra-ultra-intense stare. “I thought you didn’t like me.”

“What?” Steven said.

“I mean, you didn’t stay around to—”

Steven rolled his eyes back into his head, and let himself fall backwards. And forgot that the bunk was too narrow, cracked his skull on the wall and swore up and down every scale he knew. He grabbed at his head and determined it was more or less intact, and then said fuck it and rolled his eyes again. “That wasn’t you, all right? There was a lot of other shit going on right then, and Jesus, we’ve had maybe fifteen conversations since you moved in, which brings us up to what, a grand total of twenty in our entire lives? I don’t even fucking _know_ you, Perry.” 

“Yeah, it sounded like you and Hagar had issues,” Perry finally said. 

“Not really issues, more like, Brad’s friends with him and I respect him for what he’s accomplished in music, but he needs to fucking understand how this fucking band works if he wants to be part of it. And you just had to look at him to get that he’s as likely to get that as a wet cat is to marry the ocean.” Steven rubbed at his head some more. “So look, Bebe’s coming over at seven on Friday. We’re coming back Sunday morning. Pack light, and if you can find some money so we can buy food, great. If not, I’ll…figure out something.”

“Okay,” Perry said. He moved like he was going to get off the bed, then poked Steven in the side. “Hey, thanks.”

“No problem. Now look, I have a zillion things to wrap up with the label before we go, so if there’s some other problem you got with me, can we just put it off till we get back?” Steven said, pulling himself up, careful about ducking his head. He didn’t _hear_ anything from Perry, so he took that as a yes. “Gotta run, man. See you Friday.”

* * *

_HAMILTON: I still had mixed feelings about Joe getting close to us, but my main feeling was that I was getting very annoyed with the two of them. It was very clear that they both had to get along for us to get anywhere, but Steven just didn’t see it, for some reason, and Joe just wasn’t going to come out and talk about it. So basically, I thought they’d kill each other or jump into each other’s arms. Either way we wouldn’t have to deal with the unrelenting tension between them. And I mean unrelenting. It was like walking around in an electrical storm all the time._  
_WHITFORD: Tom and I discussed it a little, and I thought it was worth a shot. I didn’t think Steven was being difficult on purpose. He just had a lot on his mind. The trip was good in that it got him away from all of that and gave him a chance to just get to know Joe._  
_PERRY: I was pretty sure I was being screwed over._

It turned out only Perry could come. Brad was locked into session work and Tom had to go to something for Terry, which he claimed really did come down to a choice between continued sex or Jeff Beck. At least Joey was going to a different show: his old bandmates were in town and had invited him to their gig, and besides, he’d never been as into the British Invasion as Steven was.

Bebe had brought a friend along for Perry, and it looked like they were getting along fine. Perry was talking, and even cracking a smile once in a while, and Steven was starting to think that maybe the man just needed a girlfriend. Then they pulled over for gas and Steven tried to grab Bebe out by the restrooms, and Bebe told him to get in the backseat.

“No, I know, I know, _later_ ,” she said, pushing his hand off her hip. She giggled when he promptly snaked two fingers up the hem of her skirt, then shook her head. “No, c’mon, we’ve got the whole weekend for fun. Laura had a shitty week and I wanted to cheer her up, so give her a little fun.”

“I’d be happy to give her a lot, but I’m saving it all for you,” Steven told her.

Bebe’s smile turned soft, with flushed cheeks framing it. But she held his hands off and shook her head again. “No, seriously. It’s like, another hour and a half, Steven. And anyway, it’s your friend who’s being annoying.”

“Perry?”

“Yeah, she says he’s ignoring her. And _you’re_ not going back there with her, because I damn well expect a lot for these tickets,” Bebe said. Still smiling, even while her eyes dropped below Steven’s belt.

Steven swallowed hard, thought about how wild Bebe had been the last time they’d gotten together, and then had to step back into the men’s room for a second to make his jeans allow for that. Then he swallowed hard again and got into the back with Perry.

His phone went off at the same time, so he had an excuse for just flopping in there, not looking over, too busy digging out that phone and checking his texts. Hey, he had a lot of plates in the air. Never knew when he might have to save one.

“Hey, what the hell,” Perry said. He grabbed Steven’s shoulder, pushing it so Steven slid down his front and onto his legs.

“Hey, darling.” Steven got the door shut with his foot, then twisted around on the seat, trying to angle the phone’s screen out of the sun’s glare. Bebe started the car off with kind of a jerk and Steven grabbed at the nearest thing, shoving himself back up Perry. He realized he’d gotten Perry’s knee, decided it wasn’t actually that great a handhold, and moved that arm to around Perry’s neck instead. “How’s life treating you?”

Perry made this confused, contemptuous noise. “Fine, thanks. What are you doing?”

“Getting a kiss?” Steven said, glancing up. He grinned at the way Perry got all ax-to-the-head in the face, then went back to texting Joey to stop being such a smug bastard. So what if some living legend from James Brown’s band had just walked in the door, in less than three hours they were going to be hanging with Jeff fucking Beck.

“From me?”

“Yeah, why not. You’re all right,” Steven muttered. He sent the text, twisted his head around and smacked one on Perry’s temple, and then got his arm off and himself turned around on the seat before Perry could whack him. His head went off the seat when Bebe floored it back onto the highway and he caught himself on one arm, then stuck his legs over Perry to brace against the far door. “God, Kramer, you’re such a dick.”

Perry looked down at Steven’s legs. He had his arms pulled all the way in to his sides and his shoulders hunched, like if any more of him touched Steven, he’d disintegrate. “Something happen?”

“Nah, not really. Oh, hey, turn that up.” Steven flapped his hand against the back of shotgun, and when the radio still stayed low and patchy, he hooked it over the top of the seat. “Hey, turn up it up. I love this song.”

“Oh, yeah, isn’t this from that one commercial?” said Bebe. “You know, the one with the, which one’s it, the…”

“Way classic blues,” said Laura. She sighed, like somebody had just rubbed her all the right way, and then hummed along. Then she started breaking into words, just as the chorus came in.

Steven chimed in, not thinking about it, and then nearly kicked himself as his throat cracked like a motherfucker. He coughed to try and cover it and was damn glad he was already mostly lying down when the pain burst out from around his Adam’s apple.

“You all right?” Perry asked. Looking straight at him and even an idiot could’ve seen the answer to that, with Perry’s kind of view.

“Want some water?” Laura added.

Girls in the car. Steven put his head down on the seat, so he knew they wouldn’t be able to see him even in the rearview mirror. “Nah.”

“Okay.” Laura belted out the last line of the chorus, making Steven actually hate her for a moment, and then snorted. “God, I sound bad. So Bebe said you were in a band, Steven. You’re pretty good. You’re the singer, right?”

“Yeah,” Perry said.

“I thought you said you played the piano?” Bebe said, voice frowning.

Steven got his ass back up and across the seat, headlocking Perry before the man could get that one. Perry hissed, then elbowed him, and Steven took the elbow in the ribs so it’d glide back and he could smash it against the seat with his back. “Oh, I’m a little bit of everything. You know those guys in the park, they’re playing fifty instruments all at once? I’m like their role model,” he said to the girls. Then he put his head back, again so the girls wouldn’t see him losing it, getting some good use out of all that hair Perry had, and shoved his mouth right up to Perry’s ear. “The fuck are you doing? I don’t want to start shit in front of them.”

“I wasn’t,” Perry snapped back. Quietly, at least. “I just said—there’s nobody new yet, so…”

“So we’re so not talking about this right now.” Steven bit his lip, then made himself breathe. They were supposed to have a fun weekend. He was not fucking going to let that go just because Perry was a fucking moron. He was, however, going to kill Tom when he got back. Talked to Perry, Steven’s ass.

“Sorry, okay?” Perry shifted under Steven’s arm, then yanked his own arm out from behind Steven. He dug around in his jeans till he came up with some cigarettes. “I—”

“And now you’re gonna smoke out what’s left of my throat,” Steven sighed. “I thought you cared about me.”

The side of Perry’s face twitched. Not like Joey’s did, not nervous, just pure mad. Then Perry dipped his head and put on the mask of endless hair. He twisted the pack around in his hand once, then shoved it away.

“What are you two whispering about back there?” Laura asked, draping herself over the back of her seat. “You gonna run off and leave me and Bebe all alone?”

Perry looked up. For a second he was…was defensive, or something all closed-up and hostile like that. Then he grinned. The line of his mouth just did this lazy, casual thing, like the world was going to lick his feet and it’d be no more than his due, and his eyes were just the same, and it was annoying how effortless his cool could be. “Yeah, sure.”

“Gonna find a judge and make an honest man of him,” Steven said.

Laura fell back in gales of laughter, her hair floating around her head, lots of blue and red highlights there in the sun, and Steven had a lot of fun watching it. Nothing like a pretty girl to chill him out.

“So I thought you didn’t even know me. Kind of quick, isn’t it?” Perry said.

“Ah, well.” Shrugging, Steven loosened his arm. He put his head back on the top of the seat and swung his legs around so he could fold one up on the seat. “We got an hour. Tell me about your deepest, darkest desires.”

Perry looked at him. Then he snorted and looked out the window. After another moment, he put his arm up on the door and pushed his hand back into his hair, then leaned his head on that. “Any takers on that song yet?”

“It’s under consideration in a couple places,” Steven said. He got his phone out again and started flipping through his texts again. Fifteen while they’d had their little tiff just now, and five from Kramer, who was really being a boastful shit now. He was probably making up half the claims, or at least stretching the truth like saltwater taffy, but just to keep face Steven was practically going to have to sleep with Beck at this rate. 

“I kinda like it. Think we could try playing it before you sell it off?” Perry said.

Steven blinked. His thumb slipped and he cursed, yanking the phone up, before realizing he’d just misspelled a word instead of hitting send. “When did you hear it?”

“You got up at three in the morning to fuck around with it on your laptop and didn’t put on earbuds,” Perry reminded him. “If it hadn’t been pretty cool, I think I would’ve climbed up there and knocked your head off.”

“Thanks,” Steven snorted. He finished his text telling Tom to get away from Terry long enough to smack Joey for him, then checked his email. “Yeah, might not be a bad idea. It’d remind Peter that he’s got a fucking _band_ to manage, anyway.”

Perry looked at him like he didn’t know Peter. Maybe he didn’t, but God, what the hell did he and Tom talk about? They got over in the corner often enough, looking like wiseguys plotting murder.

“Our manager. Sort of.” Steven checked on the girls to make sure they weren’t paying attention. “He’s great at what he does, but kind of a shark. He keeps trying to dump Tom and Joey, says they’re not good enough. When he first signed us, he wanted to dump everybody but me, but I talked him into just adding Brad on. And now he’s always talking about how I should just go off and be a total songwriter, lose the band completely.”

“Why don’t you dump _him_?” Perry asked. “He sounds like an asshole.”

“Because, beautiful, he’s an asshole with contacts. I just started selling songs to other bands after the OD, so I don’t know enough people yet,” Steven said, sighing. “Before that everything I wrote went to the band. I mean, most of what I write’s still for that, but…we haven’t gotten to play much of it lately.”

“Oh,” Perry said. And, “so you’ll bring that one to the next practice, right?”

Steven almost missed it. Then he jerked his head around and stared at the man. Perry stared back at him, confused with just a touch of defensiveness, and Steven had to say, the man was damn good at this. Almost as good as Steven.

“Oh, right, you and Tom talked,” Steven said slowly. “I swear to God, sometimes I don’t know who’s getting played by what to the where.”

Perry stared at Steven for another second, then shook his head. He blinked a couple times, breaking up that stoneface of his, so that he could laugh without looking like he was straining something. “Yeah, well, you are, right?”

“I sup _pose_ ,” Steven muttered. He was annoyed to mildly betrayed for a little longer and then he just gave up. No, fine, he was having fun. “Oh, fuck it, yeah, I will. But look, enough fucking drama for the weekend, okay?”

“Okay,” Perry said.

* * *

Jeff Beck was mind-blowing. Ten minutes of flat-out twisting your brain into a higher plane of consciousness. And then they had the rest of the night to fill out.

It was a really little blues club, a real hole in the wall place, and it was hosting a birthday party that they were sort of, eighty percent, crashing. Jeff Beck got up and played for ten minutes, then got his ass off the stage and out the door before they could catch up to him. That was a little disappointing, but hey, even ten minutes was ridiculously good.

The other problem was, well, it was a fucking dive. Lots of booze, although since the ventilation was awful, lots of smoke that made Steven’s throat hurt too much for him to really feel like putting anything down it. But he had the sense-memory of it, looking around at the glasses in people’s hands, the way their faces flushed, the light in their eyes. Just remembering how good it could be, how easy it was to slip into that pretty floating haze, and once Beck was gone and he didn’t have anything else to concentrate on, he ended up having to go outside.

He’d told Bebe he couldn’t drink because of a stomach ulcer—not totally a lie—but hadn’t mentioned the part about it still being an incredibly seductive dagger to the gut when other people drank around him. She and Laura, of course, had loaded up, and he couldn’t blame them, but he couldn’t stay with them. And okay, he was kind of a chickenshit about it and only told them when he was outside and they texted asking where the hell he’d gone, but like his therapist said, the handles he made for himself to hold onto this shit were the handles he needed to use.

There was a ramen shop above the club, so Steven ended up snacking on a bowlful at a window seat. A guy with a guitar case wandered in right after him and they started talking, and then another musician came in—they were down the street from another club that’d apparently just closed for the night—and they were in the middle of a pretty good discussion about early metal when a familiar head bobbed up the club’s steps. Steven swirled the last noodle in his bowl, then sighed and got up.

“Perry,” he said, leaning out the door. “Hey, Joe fuckin’ Perry. Up here.”

Perry was…yeah, pretty gone. He wasn’t weaving, exactly, but he had that loose, disjointed movement to his limbs, and flushed skin around his eyes, which were all half-lidded like he couldn’t be bothered to use all of them to look around. “Where the fuck did you think you were going?” he said.

Figured he’d be a cranky drunk. Steven put a foot out the door and then heard the ramen shop guy yell at him—he hadn’t paid yet—and stepped back in. “I’m getting my friend up,” he called over his shoulder. “Chill out.”

“Friend?” Perry’s eyelids dropped a little, concentrating the waves of anger coming from behind them into scorching laser beams. He started up the steps to the shop, had his foot slip off the edge and basically flopped to the rail. His right hand slid up the rail, then down as he kept on stumbling upwards. “Jesus fucking Christ, Tyler, you’re such a fucking asshole. You don’t have friends, you know. You just have fucking tools.”

The volume in the ramen shop didn’t completely die, but it went down a good few notches. Enough to let Steven hear his own thoughts, which basically were that he really should be used to that kind of bullshit and he’d definitely heard worse and you know what, didn’t fucking matter because that _hurt_ , damn it. And for no good reason. “Well, here’s a pleasant motherfucker.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not the one who fucked the best thing in his life over for some blow,” Perry snapped.

Steven…had never really had time stop on him, not even when he was way deep into drugs. What the drugs did was make things slow down, really really slow, like trying to shake molasses out of a jar in the middle of winter, or speed them way the fuck up. They didn’t— _stop_ time. Maybe the closest they came was cutting out chunks of it, like skipping over a track, so you had the intro and then you had the fade-out and the weird blur in the middle. But time literally stopped right there. He saw it. It was this kind of silvery shimmer in the air, floating over everything.

Then it went away, and he punched the door. He watched the wood dent, with splinters coming up around the edge, and then he pulled his hand back and looked at the blood on it. It didn’t hurt as much as he figured, he thought, and then oh _fuck_ yes, it hurt. Like somebody had stuck molten metal in there.

Perry was all the way up on the top step now, trying to lean towards Steven, saying something. Steven turned around and away from the man, trying to breathe through the pain. He kept looking at his hand, because seriously, it hurt so much it was almost implausible. He kind of felt like he was in a cartoon and one of those sound-effects words should be popping up by him.

“Hey, get the fuck off—” Perry was saying.

“No, look, fuck off, man, you’re being a shit and leave him—”

“Man, you okay? You don’t look—Jesus, look at his _face_ —”

Oh, shit, he was passing out, Steven thought as the world faded out.

Somebody grabbed his arm and jerked him hard. He gasped and air, that was good, that was what he’d kind of forgotten about. Air was good and he needed a lot of it, and he kept gasping and that asshole kept shaking him. He tried to shove them off but his legs weren’t working too well, so he ended up getting dragged over and pushed down onto a chair type of thing, and then he got slapped in the face. “Jesus!”

“Stop breathing so fast. You’re going to hyperventilate,” said the guy holding him in the chair.

“Well, because I’m fucking upset!” Steven snapped. “I think I broke my fucking hand, and that asshole over there—”

There was a whole crowd around Steven now, jostling with each other, and then Perry managed to jam his shoulder through them. He was still drunk as hell and of course he reached out and grabbed for Steven’s bloody hand. “Hey, hey, look—”

“Look, you motherfucker, I fucked myself up good and I know that because I wake up every fucking day without the one fucking thing that makes me—makes me _anything_ , so _shut up_ ,” Steven snarled. He shoved himself backwards, jerking his hand out of Perry’s reach, and smacked that into hard wood. The pain made his eyes water. “I know! I know! I can’t sing! I know that! I lost it and I fucking hate it and hate you and hate everything and I hate me, I hate me so fucking much, you fucking asshole, I can’t even fucking—I can’t—”

“Oh, Jesus,” somebody said. “Hey, hey, listen, don’t—”

Steven sucked in a breath to tell off that motherfucker too, except he couldn’t get the air to go back out again. It just went one way, in, and rough as hell too, from his mouth down his windpipe all the way to his gut, which didn’t like it and wasn’t going to take it and heaved up like a bronco. It came back out in a giant jerk that twisted his whole body, way more than a plain hiccup, making his head whip up and then down.

“Jesus, he’s crying.”

“Steven?” somebody was saying. Nice and quiet, touching the side of his head, sounded like a girl. Bebe—no, Laura. “Steven? Steven, listen, honey, can we…listen, we’re going to go, okay? Let’s go, and…and let’s go somewhere a little less crowded, and you can…y’know, get some help.”

“I have help,” Steven croaked. “I have three fucking therapists. They rotate.” 

Laura patted his shoulders. “I meant for your hand, Steven. It looks pretty bad.”

“No, can’t. They’ll kill me.” Steven shook his head. “I mean, the label said I relapse and they’ll cut us off, because if I can’t sing I’m not good enough for them to pay for another clinic stay.”

“Um, okay,” Laura said. She stopped patting him for a moment, then swore under her breath. “Okay, well, look, you can still get an x-ray. That’s not going to get you hooked on anything. I’ll—Bebe’s getting the car, okay, and I’m gonna call around to find a place. Okay?”

She squeezed his shoulders. Her hair smelled of cigarette smoke and booze, but it still had a bit of sunshine under that, and it felt soft when he put his head on it, on her shoulder. “Okay,” Steven said.

* * *

“Okay,” Steven said.

Perry shifted uncomfortably in the chair. He was all slouched down so his head looked directly attached to his chest, and was pulling his leather coat around like a straitjacket. His legs went straight out into the middle of the hall, making all the passing nurses and doctors glare at him. He shot a dirty look at one who was particularly sarcastic about walking around his feet, then almost let his furtive glance meet Steven’s face. “I…look, I’m still not really sober, so they made me sit down. I don’t think there’s another chair.”

“Okay.” Steven looked up and down the hall, and found that, sadly, Perry was right. He tried to weigh up his other options, but his head was fuzzy because hey, pretty damn late now and also he’d just gotten two broken fingers set on fucking _ibuprofen_ because he was a fucking recovering drug addict, and fuck it. He sat on Perry.

“What are you doing?” Perry said, jerking up. Well, as much as being sat on would let him.

“Taking it out on you how fucking mad I am,” Steven muttered. He ground his ass down, even though Perry’s bony damn knees weren’t silk down-filled pillows. “I’m tired, asshole. Least you could do is—”

Perry grabbed Steven around the waist and Steven stiffened up, thinking he was going to get thrown off. But instead Perry pulled him back towards the wall. Then muttered at Steven’s back and squirmed around, pushing and tugging at Steven, who was just curious about where this was going, until finally they were squeezed in side-by-side, with Steven getting to lap one leg over Perry’s left knee and to use Perry’s left shoulder as a draping place.

“Okay?” Perry said.

“Are you showing some care for my well-being?” Steven said.

Perry pressed his lips together. Then he ducked behind his hair and blew out a long breath. “Okay. That thing I said, that didn’t really…”

“Look, I was fucking sober, so I’m pretty sure I know what you said.”

“I just thought you’d ditched me again,” Perry snapped. His head twisted away from Steven, then tipped back so he was facing straight up. Enough hair fell back from his face for Steven to see that his eyes were closed and that his brows were twitching, like maybe he was starting to move into hangover territory. “I got pretty drunk, and um, I…it just wasn’t really what I meant to say, but I know that’s what came out of my mouth, and…and…”

Steven looked down at his splinted fingers. They were swollen up and bruised and looked like purple sausages. “Perry, I went—”

“And why do you have to call me that?” Perry said, pulling his head down to look at Steven.

“Because it’s your name?” Then Steven sighed and tried to get out his phone. “Joe, whatever, look, what the hell is your problem? I went outside to get some air, and got hungry. I went _upstairs_. You were still with the girls. What, you can’t handle a club without me?”

“You told them where you were but you didn’t tell me,” Perry answered, as if that was an actual answer.

The phone wasn’t coming out of Steven’s pocket. It was in the pocket between him and Perry, and he couldn’t twist himself right to get at it. Motherfucker, he thought sourly, flopping back. Some weekend. “Because you don’t have a goddamn phone yet. What are we, dating?”

Perry inhaled sharply, and the end of it almost sounded like a word. Not a friendly one, but he never followed through on it.

“Besides, you asshole, I’m recovering. I’m—you know, my therapist, all three of them, they’d have my balls on a string if they knew I was even talking to somebody who’s still using like you. It’s that whole addicts together egg each other on thing,” Steven muttered. He looked at his hand again and noticed that the edge of the gauze was already fraying, and started picking at the loose thread. “Doesn’t Tom tell you anything?”

“He told me I had to keep all that shit out of the apartment, and away from you, and that they’d all take turns breaking my legs if I made you slip up,” Perry said. He raised his brows at Steven’s look, then grinned humorlessly. “I pretty much got off the harder stuff anyway before I came over from London. Elyssa…so she got me arrested once, and while I was high, and they’re different over there. You show up high to jail and they stick you straight into rehab, and they even pay for it. It’s just drinking and smoking at this point.”

“Yeah, well, still too much for me.” Steven leaned over and looked up and down the hallway, then sighed. Then winced, because he’d jarred his hand. He cradled that in his good one and tried not to jiggle his feet. “How long does it take to do paperwork, anyway?”

Perry shifted, his shoulder working up and down against Steven’s back. “I think they’re trying to talk down how much it is.”

Oh, right, the whole fucking no real health insurance thing. Independence was such a bitch sometimes. “It just got—look, it’s up to me, when you really get down to it. It’s my decision what to put in myself, and if I want to put poison in there, then I’ll do it. If I don’t want to, then I won’t. And if I’m really going to stick with this whole sober trip, then I’ve got to own that. So I’ll go to where other people hang out and if they want to drink, well…I’m gonna have to learn to deal with that. But it got a little too heavy in there and I needed to breathe. It wasn’t solely meant to piss you off.”

“Yeah, I—I kind of got that. Now.” Perry slid down in the seat a little more, so his mouth was talking into the end of Steven’s shoulder. “Look, I got frustrated.”

“I said I’d come to the next practice on the way up,” Steven said.

“I _know_ ,” Perry snapped. He went still for a second, then closed his eyes and put his hand up to push at the side of his head. “Look, I really want to be in this band. And it’s your band, I know that, and that’s why I’ve been trying to—to just talk to you about that. Except you’re always running around doing something, and I’m really—I came back here to be in this band.”

Steven glanced at Perry. The other man still had his eyes closed, but he hadn’t sounded drunk right then. Just frustrated, like he’d said, and then kind of wistful under that. “You tell Tom that, maybe it’ll touch that cynical heart of his.”

“Oh, he and I know where we stand,” Perry mumbled. He dropped his hand from his head and turned around to look at Steven. “He sent me a link to this video of that first time, you know, when you were standing on that car. You’re really good.”

“I was really good,” Steven said, after he’d taken a careful breath.

The sense of where he was treading did go across Perry’s face, but he didn’t even blink. “You still sounded good in the car, even if it—look, I know you don’t like talking about it, I know it hurts and all, but I’m just trying to explain that I really want to work with you and I’ve been trying to tell you that since I moved in and Jesus, you won’t sit still.”

“Ah, no.” Steven glanced down at his leg, jiggling away, and then sighed and pulled it up to cross over the other one.

Something pushed at his shoulder. He looked over and saw the top of Perry’s head and heard Perry’s tired sigh, and God, the man was a mean son of a bitch and more shameless than Steven, just thinking he could doze off on the guy who he’d made break some fingers, but somehow Steven couldn’t work up the effort to shove him off. Maybe being sober had made Steven nicer.

“But that can’t be the first time you heard me,” Steven finally said. “Not if you grew up around the lake.”

“Nah, I heard you plenty of other times, sitting outside that fucking barn,” Perry mumbled. He moved his head, getting more comfortable, and then let out a yawn so loud it made his hair flutter. “I was always kind of thinking about getting you to come play with us, and I really should’ve done that sooner. And I’m still pretty mad about that.”

“You keep sweet-talking like that, you’re going to make me blush,” Steven snorted. He moved his hand because it was hurting again, then looked down at Perry. Then craned his head around and yep, asshole had gone and fallen asleep on him. 

A mean, narcoleptic drunk. Talk about your mismatches, he thought, and looked down the hallway. The girls were coming back.

* * *

Well, they cut their weekend short, seeing as Steven was breaking his teeth trying to deal with the pain. Bebe offered to drive them back, and even sounded sincere about it, but she was relieved as hell when Laura said she’d been planning on going back Saturday anyway and would do it instead. Steven couldn’t blame her; girl had at least three more parties lined up and she deserved a good time.

Perry mumbled something about the train and walking Steven over, but Laura told him she sure as hell wasn’t hanging out on some platform, and also, hello, forfeited walking Steven rights when he’d had his drunken psycho fit. To which Perry said something else, or whatever, and Steven didn’t really care too much about listening in on all of it. He was tired, and also, just about reaching that stage where the pain had been around enough to flatten out into this weird, almost-druggy state of detached mind, where nothing else was really as important.

Laura shook him a couple times, apparently confusing broken fingers with broken head and thinking she had to keep Steven up. She kept asking him who she should talk to and finally he just got out his phone and handed it to her. That seemed to work. At least, she stopped poking him and he leaned up against whatever was handy and wondered if he maybe could just sleep through all of it.

He woke up two or three times. Once in the backseat of a car, going through the night-time landscape, lots of weird shadows outside, with an arm around him, his head pillowed on their hair, and them humming old Zeppelin riffs in his ear. Then again, stumbling up steps so familiar that he automatically bitched out Joey for not taking out the trash.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Joey, weirdly in front of him instead of swaying beside him. “Steven, holy shit, are you—what the _fuck_ did you give him, asshole?”

“I didn’t!” Whoever was holding Steven up jerked hard, then cursed and grabbed Steven’s coat, pulling him back against them. “I didn’t give him shit. He’s—”

“Look, this is all they gave him,” said a girl. Laura. Right. Rattling bottle. “Like, giant ibuprofen things, but that’s it because he kept talking about his therapists collecting his balls. Um, look, he’s really tired. Can he sit down?”

Joey snorted, and that was him dragging Steven over to the couch, definitely his twitchy hands and over-eager whack to the shoulder. Steven hissed, vaguely registering a spike in pain, and then realized he could go horizontal again. And did.

“Yeah, he’s good, now what the fuck happened? What happened to his hand?” Joey was asking. Sounded like he was really wanting to lay into somebody. “Wait, Laura? Are you the chick who called up Tom?”

“Where is he?” Perry. Moving around, kind of far off, and Steven moved his head on the couch cushion before his mind put two and two apart and realized he wasn’t sleeping on Perry’s shoulder now. Kind of missed it, wasn’t that bad.

“I think he went to get Tabano back so we can all kick your fucking ass,” Joey snapped. “What the fuck is wrong with you? It’s a fucking concert. You’re supposed to go and have fun and you’re—don’t you _fucking_ snarl at me, motherfucker. I’m not the one who just royally fucked up Steven.”

There was a kind of scuffle and then Laura telling them both to get the fuck back, or else she was going to try out the Taser her dad had gotten her for Christmas. Then Joey, cursing under his breath, kicking the couch so Steven’s almost drifting-off didn’t happen, and Perry still over there, sucking his breath through his teeth. “I’m fucking hungover, okay?” Perry muttered. “I’m not—”

“Oh, oh, God, that’s just great. So you did fucking take him somewhere. That’s so fucking rich, Perry. You know what, I’ve totally had it with you. I’m done. I’m so done.” Joey laughed like somebody was cutting him up with razor blades. “I mean, you just…just waltz over here from London, like you’re just gonna walk into this band, and you’ve been fucking with Steven since you got in—”

“What?” Perry said, startled.

“You so fucking know. You’re—Tom! Tom, Steven’s back, and Jesus, look, this asshole completely—”

“I didn’t do a fucking—” “Joe, what the hell is your _problem_ —”

Steven shoved his head into the crack between the seat and the couch arm, then pulled it out. “Jesus, shut up,” he moaned. “Wanna sleep.”

They did shut up. It was, even with Steven’s fuzzed-up head, kind of amazing. But then somebody grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off the nice horizontal couch. 

“Okay. Okay, look, I’ll drop him on the bed,” Joey said.

“Joey?” Steven said. He made an effort, which sucked, and lifted his head and confirmed that the bleary face in front of him was Kramer’s. “Wait, fuck is Perry?”

“Waiting to get his ass kicked,” Joey told him, trying to get under Steven’s arm. “Fifteen feet to the bed, Steven.”

Steven shrugged, felt his head dip in what was probably an alarming way except he was way too out of it, and then got hauled about halfway back. His hand banged against his leg and momentarily made him acknowledge reality and how terribly, terribly it was sucking cock right now. “Ow, fucker, trying to break something? Can I go sleep on him again? I liked that better.”

“I swear, he’s just on ibuprofen,” Laura said after a moment. “Well, that, and they set his fingers without _anything_ , and he’s been on the loopy side since then.”

“Loopy,” Tom said. 

“Well, I don’t know,” Laura said back.

Tom sighed, his usual yes-let’s-say-I’m-the-sane-one sigh. “Look, Steven? Steven? I’m talking to Joe. I think you need to go…lie down.”

“You kind of did shitty at that last time, you know. I mean, he was still all asshole and I’m not sure where he gets off yelling at me and oh, yeah, he owes me fucking dinner,” Steven said. He blinked, then folded himself over Joey, now that the man felt somewhat less likely to drop him. “Hey, tell him that when you’re talking to him, okay?”

“I’ll buy him dinner,” Perry said.

“Oh, yeah, that’s gonna make up for it,” Joey snorted. “Steven, listen, come on.”

Steven had totally forgotten Perry was there. “But he’s buying me dinner.” 

“He’ll do that _later_.” Joey pulled at him, pushing at Steven’s feet with one of his feet to make them move. “I…oh, God. This is so fucked up. Look, Steven, we fucking _promise_ that Perry’s gonna buy you dinner, okay?”

It was hard, but Steven thought about it. “Sure,” he said, and then flopped back into unconsciousness.

* * *

The morning after was always the worst part. Steven laid on the mattress for a couple minutes, just taking in how awful he felt, and then he moved his head to the side and had to spend a couple more minutes on how bad that was. Getting out of bed was like killing himself by inches.

“Oh, hey, man, you’re up.” Joey appeared in the doorway. He shuffled around there, then edged in a couple feet. “So…”

“I distinctly recall somebody giving me pain meds,” Steven muttered. He propped himself up against the side of the bunk—oh, on the bottom again—and then made himself look at his hand.

Okay. That was slightly less ugly than the memories in his head. Then he looked up at Joey and the man’s face told him that the rest of last night had been just as bad as he remembered. A flash of resentment went through Steven, like it always did when they looked at him like they were so lily-white nobody needed to look at them like that, like worried they were going to jump straight back into raving crackwhore lunacy. And then that led to remembering what raving crackwhore lunacy had been like, and what that had led to, and then Steven was pissed off at himself again.

“We talked it over and gave ‘em to Laura,” Joey said after a long, awkward moment. “For now. I mean, you weren’t awake, so we couldn’t talk to you, and…look, she crashed on Brad’s bed since he’s out. I can go get her.”

“I should probably clean up first. Girl’s been through enough without seeing what I look like in the morning,” Steven said. He didn’t move, except to twist his left leg over the side of the bed so he could poke at the floor. His toes bumped into something just under the bed and he pulled them back, then gingerly leaned over to have a look. Then he straightened up. “So, you and Tom dismember Joe?”

Joey’s eyes slid right and left, and then he closed them and sighed and sat on the bed next to Steven. “Did he give you anything?”

Steven shook his head.

“Hit you?”

“No.”

“Fuck with you?”

“Kind of,” Steven said, reflecting. “That is, he _did_ , but looking back on it, I think it was by accident. Honestly, I think he’s just a really big asshole, and I guess you are what you are. Did you at least maim him?”

A flicker of disbelief went through Joey’s face, like he hadn’t been hanging around Steven for long enough. Then he rolled his eyes and kicked up his feet, flopping back into the bunk. “Steven, honestly, I mostly want to maim you. You cut it so fucking close sometimes.”

“What, like I’m the only one on the honor pledge around here?” Steven snapped. “Why is it every time things go wrong, it’s my—”

“It’s not your fault this time but it is a hell of a lot of the time, and it’s just sometimes you really seem to be daring shit to happen to you,” Joey snapped back.

“Well, maybe I do want it to happen.” Steven closed his eyes and almost pressed his fucked hand to them. He caught himself, cracking one eye open enough to see the splints again, and then blew out his breath and looked away, towards the door. He thought something moved in the other room, some other motherfucker waiting his turn to have one at Steven. Just a big cosmic game of stick pins in the Steven ass, sometimes. 

Joey inhaled sharply. He pulled himself up, just this blur to the side of Steven’s vision, and then sat there. Sat there. Exhaled finally, angry, disgusted, whacking his hand against the bottom of the bunk.

“Fucking speeding up,” Steven muttered.

“Only you would be suicidal and still ragging on my ass,” Joey said, his voice rising too fast for laughter. “Jesus, man.”

After another moment, Steven pushed himself off the side of the bunk. He scooted his ass along the mattress till he felt steady enough on his feet to stand up, and he gauged that right for once. “I’m still planning to be around to make a fucking half-decent drummer out of you, Kramer. It’s just…some days I get fucked with so much, why the hell not just make friends with it? It’s not like it’s going away any time soon.”

“That why you haven’t gone off on Perry yet?” 

Steven flapped a dismissive hand at the other man, too busy using his eyes to search for some clothes to bother looking over. “Oh, him, he’s got that fuck-you attitude, he does great at fucking himself over. No need for me to do it.”

“Well, anyway, no, we didn’t maim or kill him,” Joey said, sitting up. He held onto the edge of the mattress and rocked back and forth. Made faces at Steven’s fashion choices. “Did tell him that he’s now the designated guy for hanging around during your freak-outs, though.”

“And how did Mr. Perry take that?” The fingers ruled out anything with buttons, or ribbons, or any kind of fascinating fastener device, sadly. Once in a while Steven did see the attraction of sweatpants, but he had to make do with one-handed tugging at one of his looser pants.

“Seemed okay with it.” Joey, pursing his lips, cocking his head, obviously sitting on something he thought was massively nasty, obviously wasn’t so much. “Steven, you know the guy’s bizarre, right? He’s making you breakfast right now.”

Well, shit. Steven had to go out and see for himself.

Joe Perry standing in the kitchen, flannel shirt, sleeves rolled up because he was just finished stuffing wet pans in the dishwasher, with a fucking buffet behind him. “Looks like something my grandma would make,” Steven said, wandering up to one plate. “You cook a lot of Italian.”

“My mother’s family is Italian,” Joe said. He looked like shit once you got up to the face. Big dark hollows under his eyes, which kept squinting, pasty undertone to his skin, mouth curled tight at the corners against whatever was left of his hangover.

“Should get my grandma’s out sometime and do a side-by-side.” Steven put another piece in his mouth. “Mm. But this doesn’t count as dinner.”

Joe rubbed at one eye. “Figured we’d work up to dinner.”

“Joe, I can’t—I really can’t sing,” Steven said. He put his hand down on the counter and leaned on it. Then he gave himself a shake and stood back from the food. He grimaced, cradling his hand against his belly. “So it’s still a band, but whatever you were thinking when you saw that video, it’s not that band.”

“Yeah, well, I figured, seeing as it’s a five-piece and that was…Tom and you.” Then Joe turned around. He shoved the trays into the dishwasher, kicked up the door with his foot and then turned back. One of his sleeves fell down and he began rolling it back up, looking at Steven. “Still your band, right?”

Steven nodded.

“And I’m still here, right?” Joe glanced around, looking for something, then retrieved a cup of coffee from by the sink. He drank it like it was the source of all life, then wiped his mouth on the side of his hand. “So can we try actually talking about it?”

“I have therapy,” Steven said. He saw Perry’s face stiffen and rolled his eyes. “Because I’ve got three therapists, because I came in once for the drug addiction and once for codependency, and I hooked up with the first second one, so I had to get a new one for that plus now they think I’m a sex addict too, and this _is_ me talking about it. Talking about the band. The band’s what fucks me up and keeps me going. You really want to talk about this? Because seriously, I’m not warning you ever again.”

Joe stood there with his coffee and considered Steven. Long and slow, unwavering gaze, very intent, taking it all in. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” Steven blinked. “Okay, well…since we’re talking, why is there a machete under our bed?”

“Well, because it’s cool,” Joe said. He drank more coffee. “Don’t you have a switchblade?”

“Yeah, because I can carry that on me,” Steven said.

Joe lingered a little with the mug at his mouth. Then he lowered that, still looking pissed off. “I had this really awesome spring blade, but I’m pretty sure Elyssa got it.”

“She got a lot of your shit,” Steven said, and watched Joe get more pissed off. “You know, I always did want to bang her.”

Joe stared at him, irked, still new enough to this to be shocked, and then the man surprised Steven by snorting. “Yeah, I think I remember that.”

“Just as well she’s an ocean away,” Steven offered. He hadn’t been going for irking Perry, not that time, but it was that problem with not seeing the point in a mental filter, as therapist two, replacement edition, put it.

“Yeah. Yeah, well, that never would’ve happened. She wouldn’t put up with three therapists.” Then Joe jerked his chin at the food. “Is that all you’re having?”

“No, probably not,” Steven said. He considered his choices, then went for the eggs. It was a little messy without utensils, but he figured that one, he was finishing up the whole plate, and two, it was Perry. The man obviously didn’t scare easy; he was staring at Steven sucking off his fingers, but weird staring in Steven’s life was like wallpaper. “Hey, so, anyway, Jeff Beck was fucking God, wasn’t he?”

Joe blinked hard. Like he’d forgotten the whole reason they’d gone the fuck up to New York anyway. Then he settled back, coffee in hand, and okay, Steven honestly should be tossing the man out or at least running the fuck the other way after the way they’d gone at each other, but Joe was grinning at him, easy and bright, totally getting it, even the weirdness of it, and standing there in rumpled clothes and smelling stale and grinning at each other seemed more like the right thing to be doing. So Steven stayed put and went with it. 

* * *

_KRAMER: I’ll admit, I was surprised about it. I thought Joe was just trying to get in Steven’s good graces to get into the band. But even I got it when he started taking Steven to the rehab clinic._  
_TYLER: All right, all right. I admit it. I wasn’t paying attention. But in my defense, Joe’s not the easiest man to read._  
_PERRY: What was I supposed to do? Hire a marching band? I did what I could with what I had. Besides, it wasn’t like nobody was telling Steven about it._  
_TYLER: I wasn’t listening!_  
_PERRY: You never listen, you asshole. Although all things considered, I’m happy about that._

Being the designated Steven freak-out person also included taking Steven to his therapy sessions. At least, according to Tom and Joey, with Brad nodding sagely in the background, and it was very nice of them but it was also something that they had never, ever, fucking subscribed to when they were taking turns minding him (for a while, house rules had been you’re proven at fault for Steven’s breakdown, tag, you’re it). Sure, they’d give him a lift if Steven absolutely couldn’t or wouldn’t get there himself, but that was more like desperation to get him the fuck into somebody else’s hands.

Joe just upgraded his subway pass. 

He was bringing in a decent amount of money from his session work, but according to him, it was all pretty much going into his share of the rent plus groceries, since the rest of them were so happy to let him be the designated cook too. If he didn’t want to get into that sort of situation, he really shouldn’t have let on that he was good at it. But anyway, he didn’t have money for a car, so they had to go for public transport, and he didn’t have money for a phone that worked, so on days Steven had to go into the clinic, Joe basically just followed him around till it was time to go because there was no way for Steven to call him and Joe refused to believe that Steven would show up to any agreed-upon meeting place. They _had_ to talk to each other.

“Steven, he’s fucking weird,” Ray said, dropping by one day. “Why do you talk to him?”

“Don’t be jealous, Tabano. I still love you, even though you fucking ripped my throat for half a week,” Steven sighed. They went too far back to stay mad at each other forever. Five minutes of insults and then they’d gone out to eat and it’d be nearly like old times again. “Besides, man’s got great taste in music.”

Ray snorted and pushed himself back, hanging his arm over the top of his chair. He glanced out the pizzeria window. “I hear he’s playing with you guys now. He any good?”

Steven shrugged. “So I hear.”

“You’re _rooming_ with him,” Ray said. “For how long now? And he’s in your _band_.”

“Yeah, well, things just kept coming up, okay? We couldn’t afford space for all of us, so we haven’t all been able to get together. I think he and Tom, and maybe Brad sometimes, they go jam on the roof.” Steven picked at the sausage on the two slices left in front of them. “I’ve been working with Joey up there, and you know we have to take turns because it’s so fucking small. And it doesn’t overlap because of when Brad and Joe have to be out working, and when I’ve got to be in some damn songwriting meeting because they don’t like my damn lyrics.”

“Awww, got slapped with M for Mature again?” After following the ass of a brunette down the street, Ray turned around and gave Steven a friendly smack on the shoulder. “I always found that hilarious, given that it’s yo—oh, hey.”

Joe nodded back, squeezing past the table behind them. He set his guitar case against the wall, then realized that they didn’t have a third chair. Steven spotted one a few tables away and pointed, and Joe squeezed back out.

“He’s gunning for you, man,” Ray suddenly said. He looked at Joe’s back, then twisted around and leaned forward, dropping his voice. “Seriously, Steven. Don’t you see it? Even the whole thing, he’s not nagging you to just hear him now, I think that’s just a ploy. He saw chasing you around wasn’t working, so now he’s stalking you.”

Steven stared at his friend. Then he reached over and pinched Ray. He had to yank his bad hand out of the way when Ray swore and swung for him, then grabbed his soda before it tipped over. “Ray. First…first of all, chasing and stalking are the same thing. Second, I know he was gunning for me, because hey, broken fingers? We already put that to bed. And third, you brought him back, motherfucker. What happened to ‘you need a roomie, shut up and share’?”

“Yeah, I know, and I’m so—all right, I missed it, I’m sorry, but just watch your back, man. I know now that when he just came over and started talking to me about you guys, that’s not something a guy like him just does, but…” Then Ray looked up. He raised his brows, then smiled, unfriendly as a shark, and got up. “Hey. I think I’m off, man. Catch you for the game on Saturday?”

“Give me a call,” Steven said, and then turned around.

Joe shrugged and dropped his chair, maybe pretty close to Ray’s foot as Ray went past him. Then he took Ray’s old seat, cocked his head at the sausage-less slices, and lifted one hand to get the waitress’ attention. “When’d he come back?”

“Missed him?” Steven snorted. 

“I don’t like him,” Joe said. He slouched back in his seat, pulling at his hair till he got it bunched at his neck. He pulled off one of those folky leather bracelets from his wrist and used it as a tie, then put his arms down, kinking his wrists. Long day at the studio, judging from how torn-up his fingertips looked. “He’s your friend, and I’m fine with it staying like that.”

“Somebody told him about New York, and he came over to see how I was,” Steven said after a second. The waitress came over and Steven ordered Joe’s usual, since Joe was busy being tense and stony and silent. “You know, it all started when you came over with him.”

Joe snorted and pushed at a piece of hair that’d escaped the tie. “I was trying to find Tom, but he wasn’t answering anything I tried. Friend of a friend pointed Tabano out, said he thought the guy was playing with Tom, so I went over to talk to him. What, that’s a big deal?”

“No, but he was pissed off about New York.” Steven sighed and went for his soda, and accidentally knocked his splinted fingers into the glass. He kept forgetting, damn it. “Fuck. Don’t look like that. I can’t help if people are still hearing about it.”

“Well, you’re not telling them to kick my ass,” Joe muttered.

“Yeah, be grateful,” Steven snapped. His fingers were supposed to be hurting less by this point, but he supposed hitting them probably wasn’t helping with that. The fucking ibuprofen wasn’t doing much of anything either and he only had so much teeth to grind down. Being around Joe Perry did tend to keep him busy enough, one way or the other, to ignore the pain, but sometimes Joe was still just an asshole.

Joe looked at him, mouth shaped around another insult. Then he just straightened himself up, fidgeting with the edge of the pizza pan. 

“You know, they always yell at me first,” Steven added.

“I’m grateful,” Joe said. He was stone-faced till Steven gave up and snorted, and then he relaxed enough to offer a shrug. “They should find something else to talk about.”

“Give me a kiss and that’ll probably do it,” Steven said, looking up. He put out his hand—his good one—to help the waitress get down Joe’s plate, then turned back to find Joe sulking on him again. Steven rolled his eyes and helped himself to the fresh sausage on Joe’s pie. “Anyway, it happened, can’t make it un-happen, just gotta talk it through, baby. At least, that’s what therapist numero uno tells me. Just see what comes of it all.”

* * *

Some good things did eventually come out of the whole New York debacle. Laura turned out to have serious connections everywhere, and got him an appointment with a Boston doctor who was supposedly a specialist in figuring out how to get former addicts pain relief without making them relapse.

On the other hand, Bebe didn’t seem to be so into former addicts who had nervous breakdowns in ramen shops. She was still friendly, and they were probably going to keep hanging out, but the sexual vibe was definitely gone.

“Just as well, Steven, because you don’t really need to add STDs to your list of woes,” said Laura. She wasn’t likely to hop into bed with Steven any time soon either, but she was so amazingly cool Steven didn’t really regret that. It wasn’t too often you met a girl who’d walk you to the clinic and then stay to review your test results with you. “Although I appreciate that you get yourself checked out so often. So many guys are such macho morons about that.”

“Yeah, well, knowledge is power and all that, and you get counseling vouchers every time you sign up for it. Those three therapists don’t come che…” Steven looked up, hearing the door chime, and then stared at the man who’d just walked through the clinic door.

Joe Perry. Fucking Joe Perry. Holding that tell-tale manila envelope. Going to get coffee Steven’s ass.

“You went for the free vouchers too?” Laura finally said. She sounded as gobsmacked as Steven.

“What?” Joe said. He hunched up his shoulders, actually fucking embarrassed. Then he shrugged them down and rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what happened. I just wanted to sign up for that—for cutting out the booze, and they were shoving all these forms at me, and then they shoved a needle in me. I thought I’d walked into the methadone clinic by accident.”

Steven snorted, then let that just break into the full-on laugh it wanted to be. He got up and slung his arm around Joe’s shoulders before the man could get into one of his pissy snits. “Our wounded warrior. Well, come on, man, let’s go celebrate.”

Joe opened his mouth.

“We’re getting you a fucking _phone_ ,” Steven said, rolling his eyes. “Because I sold my song this morning, and also, you want to know what’s up with me, you need one.”

For another moment Joe eyed Steven like he was something poisonous. Then he ducked his head, not quite fast enough to hide the smile. Steven laughed again, letting himself swing off Joe, and caught sight of Laura looking at them. She had a…it wasn’t really an expression Steven had seen before. Real intense, real amused, and then there was this heat in it, real smoldering, but…still not about getting in bed with Steven. Odd, he thought, and then Laura got up and started talking about what she was gonna get, if Joe got a phone, and Steven let that go. Temporarily.

* * *

“Cool chick, for sure, but I don’t know, I think something’s up with her,” Steven said.

Joey twisted around in his chair, then twisted back. He checked his watch, checked the clock on the wall, and then checked his phone. Even without the nervous tic with his right eye, he was more fidgety than Steven. “So are you bailing on that other doctor she’s setting you up with?”

“No, I’m still going to that. I think that’s on the level, and anyway, I looked him up online and he’s a hell of a lot better than what the label’s going to spring for. It’s a modern world and if the chick’s gonna pay, I’m okay with it.” Steven untucked his leg from under him and watched everybody twitch. He counted to ten, then sighed. “Would you all stop looking at me like I’m going to jump one of you? I’m fine. I had a call with the therapist before this, I’m going to debrief afterward, and I’m _fine_.”

“Okay, Steven,” said Brad. Sitting on the chair farthest from Steven, strategically near the door and yes, Steven picked up on that. Good man, Whitford, stratospheric musician, but when in doubt, leave was his motto in life.

It was on the tip of Steven’s tongue to point out that them being nervous was going to make him nervous, and so they were just feeding the problem. But instead he just reached out and pulled the laptop over to him again. He moved the cursor to take it out of sleep and then clicked to the YouTube clip of the next guy who was supposed to be auditioning for them. “It’s pretty sad when Joe’s the one getting on my nerves the least.”

“Joe’s not even in the room,” Joey said.

“Yeah, exactly,” Steven replied. He caught Tom pulling one of those faces from the corner of his eye and turned on the man. “Hey, so while we were up in New York, he said you sent him video of our first gig.”

Tom blinked. “I did what? He said this what, when he was breaking your—”

“Okay, for the last time, I broke them,” Steven sighed. “Although granted, he provoked it, but so you didn’t?”

“I didn’t…” Then Tom tilted his head back and considered the question again. “Oh, you mean the time from the Barn. Yeah, somebody posted video online and I found it, and emailed it to him. It was just a couple weeks afterward and basically I was saying fuck you, man.”

Steven blinked hard. He…could see Tom doing that, but that hadn’t been how Joe had made it sound. 

“Hello England, look what you missed?” Joey said, grinning and nudging Steven.

Tom nodded, then stretched out his back. He checked his watch. “Joe emailed back something like three months later, and all he said was he asked whether we were still playing together. Where the hell is this guy?”

“Maybe he and Perry ran into each other out front and Perry ate him,” Joey suggested. 

“I know, he hasn’t been into any of the guys. And you assholes thought I was bad,” Steven snorted. He absently scratched under the splints on his fingers, then winced as a twinge went through one of them. The pain guy had been helpful, and anyway, at this point the swelling was almost gone, but sometimes Steven thought it was further along than it was.

Joey wasn’t much for lying, or being sarcastic, or anything that really required him to do anything but give his honest, blunt opinion. He looked at Steven with big, straining-to-be-serious eyes, then down at the floor, flapping his hands back and forth off his knees. “Well, pretty much says who he _is_ into, doesn’t it?”

“The fuck is that about?” Steven said, staring at him.

“He’s been off on that smoking break a while,” Brad cut in.

“Hey, call that asshole,” Tom said. To Brad, a little more forcefully than he needed to. “Tell him he’s got two more minutes and then we’ll just get the next guy to come in early if he can.”

Steven looked at his bandmates—acting weird, acting weird, acting miffed because Tom was the weirdest of all, frankly—for a moment, then got up and went to go find Joe. 

“I was just going back in,” Joe said, blinking. He flicked his crushed-out butt into the dumpster, then came out of the alley. “What, he finally show?”

“Nope, but Joey thinks you have a crush on me,” Steven said.

The only part of Joe’s face that moved was his brows, and they just made the faintest twitch upwards. “I do.”

Steven cracked up. He had to lean against the wall and put his hands on his knees for support, and then hang his head for a few seconds to catch his breath. And even then, when he straightened back up, he was still so wheezy that he couldn’t quite focus on Joe. “Man, you’re a riot.”

Joe put his hands on Steven’s arms and pushed them back, and Steven was thinking that was unusually nice of the man to help him stand like that when Joe kissed him. Pissed off, seriously pissed off, literally growling through it. Then he yanked himself back. “You are such a—a _jackass_ , Steven.”

“Okay,” Steven said, blinking.

Joe exhaled. This tight little noise, but ragged at the edges, and the way he was looking at Steven was the same. Mad the way only he could do mad, not just pure intensity, but _shades_ of it, the way you realized that night came in shades of black when you went from countryside to city. The mad in his eyes went from righteous to frustrated to fearful.

“Shit,” he muttered. His hands flexed sharply on Steven’s arms, like they’d just spasmed. “Shit. I…shit. I…”

He took off his hands and Steven put his good hand on Joe’s jacket, grabbing up the leather so the zippers cut his palms, and by the time Steven dragged the man back, Joe’d already jammed his hands back around between Steven’s ass and the wall. They were instantaneously trying to crawl into each other, hot mouths rough hands frantic lust, and Jesus, okay, _yeah_ , Steven suddenly got it.

“You asshole,” Joe mumbled around Steven’s lip. He was yanking up Steven’s shirt out of Steven’s jeans, his nails leaving little stinging trails all over. Then he pressed one palm around Steven’s side over onto the belly, pushing heat onto the sting. “You _asshole_.”

“Could’ve just, I don’t know, _said_ ,” Steven groaned. He hooked his arm with the broken fingers over Joe’s shoulder before he did something stupid and painful with it, and then sealed his mouth over Joe’s outraged snarl. God, that felt good on his tongue.

So they never made it back to the auditions. The manager of the place walked in on them and threw them out for public indecency, and then Tom bitched at them the whole way back to the apartment. Steven wasted a lot of breath defending them when the moment they got into their room, Joe just took up where they’d left off. He did have a good idea sometimes, Joe Perry.

* * *

“This is a _shit_ idea,” somebody said.

Steven blinked. Then again, staring up at the underside of his bed. He turned his head towards the door, where the voices were, and got a whole mop of sweaty, heavy hair grumbling into the side of his neck. “Joey?”

“No, asshole,” Joe mumbled. He pushed up, then jerked his hips down and went up on his knees and one arm. Then he slumped off to the side, dropping his legs, staring at the wall, cranky and sleepy. He grimaced, scratched some hair off his forehead, and looked down at Steven, still cranky and sleepy and now confused too. “What?”

Oh, he fucking knew. He might be bitchy as hell but he damn well knew what he was doing, pulling out of Steven like that. The bastard was just lucky it felt so good. “Get off, that’s Joey outside.”

“So?” Joe put his head back down. He grimaced again as his necklace caught him under the chin, then turned onto his side and flicked the beads out of the way. His leg dropped across Steven’s groin, just this long press of muscle, triggering all sorts of low warm aches, and Steven twisted and Joe watched that from the side, eyes half-lidded, letting his hand ride over Steven’s chest. 

“Steven!” Joey yelled. “Steven!”

“What?” Steven called back. He figured out how his shoulder connected to his arm to his hand and pushed at his hair, pulling the sweaty clumps out from under his neck. Then he let his arm flop back over the end of the bed, blinking hard. Jesus.

“Steven, are you okay?” Joey yelled. “Can I come in?”

Joe snarled, just about half-hearted enough to not piss off Steven because it had been a _fuck_ , Jesus, and not just Steven not being able to keep up, and shoved his head into Steven’s shoulder. “Asshole.”

“Hey, man just cares about me.” Although Steven left it another moment before he finally began to seriously wriggle and pull at himself, getting out from under the other man. He worked up against the bar across the end of the bed, hissing as his splints snagged against the mattress. “Joey, what?”

“I just—” the door cracked open, then slammed shut. “Jesus fucking _Christ_. Aren’t you _done_?”

“No,” Joe muttered, and when Steven looked at him, he shrugged and flicked Steven’s nipple. Looked at Steven over that, that irritation of his unfocused, like he’d left it out on the road in high summer, so he was basically asking Steven for it, but…just not that kind of angry asking.

Steven bit his lip without thinking about it, then tried to rub that with his bad hand without thinking about it. Then gave up on thinking and just slouched against the bedframe. “Why, did you need something?”

“Clothes?” Joey said. Even through the door he sounded whiny. “On you? Steven, Jesus.”

“They kind of get in the way, Joey,” Steven said, looking at Joe. Who was fingering some of the banged-up bits they’d just given each other, working his nail around a scrape that maybe was due to that shirt of Steven’s not coming off nearly as easy as it looked like it would. It made Steven breathe in quick, triple-timing it, and he was still pretty light-headed. “Besides, nothing you ain’t seen before.”

Joe glanced at him, then flattened his palm down over Steven’s ribs, sliding it along their curves, counterweighting the way the rest of him slipped up so they were making out again. A little too hard, little too heavy for their sore mouths, hurting as much as it felt good, and no, Steven wasn’t really into sorting all that shit out. He’d let the therapist do it. When he saw them. When he wasn’t getting all tongue-fucked and grabbing Joe’s head, and getting his splints tangled in Joe’s hair but whatever, Joe might sound a little pissed about it but what he was _doing_ , was sticking his hand down looking for Steven’s cock, so obviously it was pretty good for him too.

“…Perry’s goddamn ass, no, I haven’t, and I don’t want to start now,” Joey was saying.

“Can—fuck.” Joe ducked his head, then got all snarling when Steven grabbed his shoulder. But him holding still was the only way that Steven was getting those splints out while still keeping some of that hair on Joe’s head, so shove it, fucker. “Can he just fuck off?”

“It’s okay, Joe, he did,” said Laura. Who was in the room. Grinning like a cat stuffed with Russian caviar. “Wimp. Me, I appreciate the front-row seat, guys.”

“Uh, honey,” Steven said, for lack of anything better.

Laura snorted and crossed her arms over her chest, and kept on staring at Joe’s ass till even Joe looked uncomfortable. “Steven fucking Tallarico, it took me more phone calls and begging than you know to get you that doctor’s appointment, I’m talking epic fake _crying_ spells and do you know what my brand of mascara costs? And you just blew it off. And you know what, I am honestly fine with that.”

“Why do people keep coming in here?” Joe muttered. He pushed himself off Steven, behind Steven, leaving Steven to just hang out there.

Not that Steven had anything to be ashamed of, but thanks for the back-up, Perry. Steven pushed himself up to sitting, swore up and down the streak of ache going from his ass up his spine, and felt himself blushing as Laura _ate_ that shit up. The woman was practically—smug as hell and open about it and honestly, even with his life behind him, Steven thought it was indecent. “I’m really sorry, Laura. I…shit, were we at it that long?”

Joe was lying down, face-first. He grunted when Steven poked a foot at his ass, but that was it.

“Looks like it,” Laura said. Her smile was—she looked like she was fucking cataloging them. Bruises, possible positions, the whole works. “Anyway. Glad to see you two got that out of the way.”

“Go the fuck away,” Joe mumbled.

Steven patted the man on the shoulder, got himself a smack, and decided to just…get something between him and all those big white grinning teeth of Laura’s. He worked himself around, knees pulled up, and spotted the remains of his shirt. Moving on, he saw one of Perry’s shirts and leaned over to hook it up. Flannel smelled a bit…not clean, he thought, but oh, well, he wasn’t exactly squeaky right now either. He tossed it on and flapped the tails over his groin. “I’m sorry, I really did—”

“Oh, whatever, I’ll go cry some more and flash a boob if I have to. We’ll reschedule,” Laura said, tossing an airy hand. “But anyway, damn it, you do owe me. Who moved on—oh, who am I kidding, so how frustrated was Joe, anyway?”

Joe hit Steven’s hip with his fist. “Make her go away.”

“No, asshole, you get off your ass and do it yourself,” Steven said, basically on reflex. He was still taking in the awful wonder that was an intensely fascinated Laura. “Frustrated? He’s frustrated all the time.”

Laura started to reply, then stopped herself with a finger across her lips. She stepped half out of the room and looked to the left. “Hey, Hamilton! So before New York, how clueless was Steven?”

“Like a fucking brick,” Tom called back.

“I was not!” Steven snapped.

The asshole by him lifted his head and looked up at Steven. “So you just like playing dumb?” Joe asked.

All flat in the voice, no color, no expression. So flat that the mind had to make up variations to overlay that, because human comprehension just couldn’t handle anything that perfect, had to have some kind of flaw to hang onto. And then all edges in his eyes, not a straight line in there, nothing that Steven could just follow on to the end, but only ones that twisted and turned back to cut themselves up.

“Knew it,” Laura said, crisp and distinct, just a simple grace note. She gave Steven a last grin as she snapped her fingers his way. “All right, don’t kill each other now.”

Then she waltzed out the door. Her hand or something caught it on the way, pulling it towards the frame, but the door lost steam a couple inches short, and then Joe sat up while Steven was still contemplating how likely it was that some other fucker would come storming inside. Joe glanced at Steven, then looked again, finally registering whose shirt it was. His mouth twitched, but he kept it shut.

“I’m not an idiot,” Steven said, and watched Joe’s mouth still. “But you’ve got a pretty fucking weird way of showing you like somebody.”

Joe angled his head down, swiping hair off his neck. He put his hand down and shifted, and then his hand came up as he settled into the new place, floating near the tail of the shirt of his Steven was borrowing. He flicked it. “I was trying to get you to listen me.”

“Yeah, I know.” Steven couldn’t help a snicker. “ _Years_ now, Perry. I do have a high opinion of myself, but that’s a fucking long time for holding your balls.”

“Well, I didn’t know when I asked you the first time, asshole,” Joe snapped. He shoved himself up against the wall, scowling, and then sighed and stared off past Steven’s right shoulder. “I just wanted—I wanted a really fucking good singer for my band, you know?” His eye rolled a little, maybe almost enough to look back at Steven, and then returned to Steven’s framed vintage Yardbirds playbill. “I figured it out when Tom sent me that video of you and him jamming together. It was just…I don’t know, there was this really fucking amazing thing going on.”

Right, Steven thought, and listened to Laura whooping it up with somebody in the kitchen. Sounded like Joey, who had gotten over his trauma damn fast. Then Steven grimaced and wondered why he was still surprised when it didn’t come out right.

“I turned off the sound the second time I watched it, and it was still there. I still felt it. It’s just the whole thing together.” Joe ducked his head and rubbed at his mouth. “Except it wasn’t finished, you know? Not everything was there.”

“And you figured you were the missing link?” Steven said.

Joe looked over, then twisted himself off his ass and onto his knee, leaning forward on that hand by Steven’s hip. He dropped his head over Steven’s shoulder, just breathing, and there was this stripe of black straggling down his back. Steven lifted his hand and pushed at the hair, and it didn’t move so he got down with his nails and peeled it off, let it go over the back of his hand as Joe pushed a little more forward, just enough to lay his lips against Steven’s mouth. Put his hands down over Steven’s hips, just quiet and slow, two things Steven almost never went for because they were boring and he hated boring even when he was sober. They made him squirm and itch and want to jump off a cliff just to hear somebody scream.

But this quiet and slow, this kind of place, where he was just moving his mouth a little, just enjoying the way it fit around Joe’s, no rush, and where he was and not worrying about where he wasn’t, this just seemed to fit.

His arm eventually slipped down around Joe’s shoulders, and Joe slid more to the side, putting his weight on his hip instead of his knees. Hit his head on the top bunk and just flopped into Steven, cursing. And Steven was laughing at him, but Joe restrained his asshole side to digging his chin into Steven’s shoulder.

“So it’s really not my fault I missed out on your magic guitar this time,” Steven said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Joe moved his jaw so he wasn’t sawing Steven’s shoulder in half. “Sorry. Dinner’s on me.”

“Dinner _was_ on you anyway, Joe, since you still haven’t bought me that.”

“Steven, shut up,” Joe sighed, rolling his head over for that.

* * *

They had to get it out in the open at least once. “So we fucked,” Steven said.

Brad nodded and kept tuning his guitar. He paused, looked at the laptop in front of him, and then asked Joey to load the next episode for him.

“And we’re probably going to do it again,” Steven added.

“Then you’re putting down the whole deposit next time,” Tom muttered. He reached around Joey and hit the laptop, then patted Joey, who hadn’t taken his head out of his hands yet, on the back. “It’ll be okay, man.”

Joe finally wandered out from the bathroom, still flipping water out of his hair. “What?”

“We’re fucking,” Steven told him.

“Yeah, I know,” Joe said. He looked around at the other guys, then frowned and looked over his shoulder.

“We kicked her out. She was getting creepy,” Tom explained. After an exchange of glances with Brad, he sighed and folded his hands together and looked up at Joe and Steven. “Glad you guys stopped fucking around.”

Steven opened his mouth.

“Yes, Steven, we know, no need for details.” Tom allowed a little smirk onto his face, then ran his hand across his mouth to pull that away. “Joe, on behalf of everybody else that’s got to live with Steven, you break him, we’re not going to pry the pieces off of you. Out of you. Whichever. We’re not even going to show up for the autopsy. Okay?”

Joe stood there and did that intense stare of his, the one where he tried to peel down everything to the core. Tried, anyway, because Tom was the one of the better-mannered ones, but he’d gone through just as many fires and firefights as the rest of them had and his skin wasn’t going to give that easy.

“Yeah,” Joe said abruptly. “Yeah, fine.”

“And Steven, we love you, but we also all took that vow to be honest with each other from rehab on,” Tom went on. “So yes, Joe is an asshole, but you’re an asshole too, and you’re a sober one now, so we believe that you’re perfectly capable of figuring out what you want to be going to bed with. So nobody’s going to trade rooms with you. Ever.”

“Fair enough,” Steven said after a moment. “Okay, then. I think that that was a healthy discussion. I’m so proud that we’re mature enough to have this kind of talk.”

“Total lovefest tonight, huh,” Joey said, finally looking up. He rubbed at his twitchy eye, then got off the couch and into the kitchen. “I’m hungry. Joe, there any leftovers or did Steven get them all again?”

* * *

_HAMILTON: Of course, it being us, it wasn’t smooth sailing after that. Actually, now you had to worry about the two of them teaming up._  
_WHITFORD: I started looking around for my own place. I love Steven and Joe, but I really didn’t need to see that much of them._  
_HAMILTON: Plus Steven’s health was an issue again. How the band was coming together was an issue again. We just always seem to have a lot of issues, and somehow we just handle them together._

Selling the song meant that Steven got to be home a little more, but now he and Joe had something else to do. Also, not only were the other guys not trading rooms, but they also got unusually upset about having their rooms…well, used. Never mind that Joe, according to his test results, was definitely a hell of a lot cleaner than ninety-nine percent of what they voluntarily let in there, he and Steven got kicked out about five times in one _day_. And before Joe could grab his guitar. So yeah, still not listening to the man.

“Steven, damn it,” Joe hissed, squirming. He slapped at Steven’s shoulder, fingers dragging behind to scratch across Steven’s collar and onto Steven’s neck, and then came, his body snaking so fucking pretty between Steven’s hands. “ _Jesus_.”

“Saved a hell of a lot more people than me,” Steven snorted, sitting back. He wiped at his mouth, came off with something on his hand, and put that hand out.

They both looked at it, Joe staring through his hair that really didn’t get in the way at all of that hot hazy lust. Then Joe reached down—slipped against the wall, legs unsteady, snarling at himself because of that and Steven was cracking up—and hauled Steven up by the arm, one-handed. Other hand ruining another one of Steven’s sample-sale designer blouses as it pushed open the front of Steven’s jeans and pulled out Steven’s cock. Steven, still laughing even with his breath dying on him, falling shoulder-first against the other man, twisted his head around so Joe had his ear and then licked off his hand.

The fucking asshole _bit_ his ear, like Steven was ever fucking giving him that again, and then oh, fucking God, made Steven take that back with a long lick from there to across Steven’s mouth. Steven slipped again, had to hook his arm over Joe’s neck, and was burying his face in Joe’s hair when they got kicked out again.

“Well, look, we can’t go back yet,” Steven said, and reasonably enough in his opinion. He prodded the buzzer again. “I know Joey, when he’s like that he’ll do something like call the cops on your ass just to get you out of there. He kicked me out on the highway and made me haul a fucking double bass three miles once.”

Joe stopped smoldering for a second. “You play the double bass?”

“No, but I figured it’d look impressive in the corner.” Steven hit the buzzer again, then sighed and pulled out his phone. No answer to his texts. He stepped back so he could case the front of the building. It had a lot of ivy and they’d only have to go two stories up.

“And Joey disagreed?”

“Well, to be honest, it was more his girlfriend at the time plus some unresolved bad parenting issues and my heroin habit and perfectionist-slash-control issues, but three fucking miles in November,” Steven muttered. “Damn near got pneumonia.”

Joe pushed the hair back from his face. “So what’d the therapists say about that?”

Man was starting to get the hang of them. “Oh, they made me apologize during group sessions, and then Joey said sorry, and we hugged and all that and I own the fact that I was a massive asshole, and still basically am, but look, he _was_ fucking phoning in that gig. Jesus, Laura, Facebook says you’re fucking home so come the fuck on.”

“We can’t try somewhere else?” Joe said.

“Like where? Don’s still mad at me, you and Ray would kill each other, and Peter would use it as an excuse that I’m getting unstable again and outpatient’s not good enough. Oh, wait, Bebe,” Steven said. He looked over, hearing Joe’s snort. “Don’t you like anybody? I mean, you know somebody, feel free to say, because I just remembered Bebe’s modeling in London this week.”

“I haven’t been here that long.” Joe stared off towards the street, mouth curling into his usual snarl. “And most of it, I’ve spent working or trying to figure you out.”

Steven hit the buzzer again. “What, you don’t make friends at work?”

“I think somebody said something to them,” Joe muttered. “Somebody from England. They’re okay to work with but I can tell they’re talking about me behind my back.”

“I was wondering how you got so good in the sack when it comes to guys. Pretty sure Elyssa didn’t teach you that,” Steven said. He heard something inside and scooted up to the door, pressing his ear to the wood, and that turned his head right when Joe slammed himself back against the jamb, one foot coming off the ground and missing Steven’s knee by an inch. On purpose, said Joe’s scowl. “Hey, what the hell was that for? You snort something when I wasn’t looking, so everything’s turning pretty colors now? I look blonde?”

“No,” Joe snapped. “Look, does the concept of I don’t want to talk about it—”

Steven pushed himself off the door. “It’s only a concept if it exists, and you drop her name enough so how the hell am I supposed to know? It’s not my fucking fault she fucked you over, is it?”

Joe opened his mouth, and then didn’t say it, but just the way his eyes flickered told Steven the son of a bitch hadn’t been about to say no. For a second Steven just…marveled, really, at how amazingly convoluted the world according to Joe Perry was.

Then he turned around. “Where are you going?” Joe said, jerking forward and grabbing Steven’s shoulder. “Hey—”

“You know, my whole life, you can basically sum it up as ‘Steven!’ and ‘what’d I do,’” Steven said, yanking himself back around. He did it so quick Joe’s fingers caught him across the jaw, and that stung like hell, but not so much as the giant fucking undeserved guilt trip the fucker had just tried to lay on _his_ shoulders. “I’m at peace with that. I really am. I am a shit-stirrer and can’t change my stripes even if I wanted to. But _Jesus_ , I wasn’t even _there_ when you—whatever—”

“Steven—”

“I don’t even care if I actually was, I don’t know, your magical infatuation into the land of man-love, okay?” Steven snapped. His voice was rising into throat-straining range and he tried to remember to not do that. To calm down. To at least not make himself a fucking casualty to somebody else’s ego. “Even if I was, it’s still not me. Okay? It’s you and her. You’re the one who decided to go with her, nobody held a gun to your head, you—”

“I’m not sorry I went with her,” Joe said. He paused, his mouth still open and tense, and then exhaled and slumped back against the side of the door. “Not really. That’s just how it happened and I can’t help that, and I didn’t have any way of knowing what was going to happen back here. I keep telling you and Tom that. But—it’s how I left, okay? And when. I should’ve done that sooner. It was getting like I was drowning.”

Steven stared at him. “And…I’m supposed to be overcome with emotion now? Being your rebound savior from your grand tragic romance?”

“You’re not a fucking rebound.” Joe looked more disgusted by the idea than Steven did, and that took some doing, because Steven was the essence of disgusted right now. “I figured out Elyssa and I weren’t working anymore, and then I figured out I wanted to come back here. And maybe I didn’t tell her that too nicely, but I’m…when I’m done with something, I’m done. I can’t pretend just to keep things going, you know? I’m not that kind of person.”

“Sounds like I should call her up just to see how I’ll know when you’re done with me,” Steven said. “I mean, if you get crazy and set shit on fire, or anything like that.”

“I’m not going to be done with you,” Joe snapped. “That’s what I figured out and that’s what pissed her off, you fucking asshole. I looked at her and I looked at you, and you won before I even got to know you.”

The door creaked inwards and Laura looked out at them. “Had to be you two, from the sound of it. What’s up?”

“We got kicked out and I need to borrow your couch to fuck him on,” Steven said, staring at Joe.

“Well, I needed to talk to you about that doctor anyway,” Laura said, swinging the door wide open. “Come on in.”

* * *

They told Steven when he checked with the front desk that a different doctor was going to see him, but he sort of missed it because Joe, the asshole, had been a shit all the way over and was still being a shit. Fucking the man hadn’t changed his temperament much.

Steven remembered when the nurse called his name and asked about it, but the nurse said that this was the guy he’d been scheduled to see. She was one of those no-nonsense, battleship types who was going to haul you along in their wake no matter what and by the time Steven got to the second question, he was in the examining room and she was going on about the doctor being by in a couple minutes. She shut the door on his ‘wait a fucking—’ and there he was, hanging his jaw.

For a moment he considered going after her. But Laura had pulled a lot of strings and he figured he should respect that. Even if, frankly, he was beginning to think that she would be willing to take payment in watching Joe feel him up, in which case _she_ owed _him_.

Laura’d pointed out earlier that he got like that about two women. Steven had pointed out that she wasn’t exactly offering to get a girlfriend for him, and she had fired back that he’d never asked. Which had been true, upon serious thought, and so he had asked, and right about then Joe had banged a glass into the sink hard enough to shatter. More importantly, it’d been Steven’s glass and one he’d brought with him from the old family hotel, and so yeah, he kind of fucking minded. And it’d been downhill since there.

“Mr. Tyler?” said the doctor standing in front of him.

Steven blinked. People had stopped appearing like that since he’d gotten clean, but okay. Apparently, being mad at Joe goddamn Perry was not that far off of being coked out. “Yes?”

“Hello, I’m Dr. Larsson.” The doctor shook Steven’s hand and then gestured for him to take a seat on the examining table. “Now, I understand that you’ve been suffering from some throat problems.”

“I…” Steven said.

The doctor smiled in what he undoubtedly thought was a reassuring manner. “I’ve looked at your file, but why don’t you just start off with telling me in your own words what’s been going on.”

Five minutes later Steven was telling Laura and Joe in the stairwell of the fucking building what was the matter. “A fucking ENT? You fucking bitch, you—”

“You can’t just do that,” Joe said. “You can’t just trick him like that. That’s—that’s invasion of privacy, isn’t it?”

“You said another pain guy!” Steven shouted, and he felt his throat start to turn raw. He pulled back on himself, ‘guy’ skewing into croaked, and then grabbed at the railing as his foot slipped. His hip banged into the rail hard, but he didn’t have a hand to spare because his other hand was pushing into his throat. “Goddamn it, Laura, do you think this is fucking funny?”

“It is for pain,” Laura hissed back. “How else was I supposed to get you here? You fucking blow up the city every time somebody even talks about it, and then everybody hurts. It’s a public service I’m doing here. Look, this guy’s tops in the nation. Don’t you want to at least give him a try? If he can do something—”

“And if he can’t?” Joe snapped.

Laura worked her mouth, blinking. Then she pulled her rage back on and rounded on Joe. “Yeah, really, that’d be bad for you.”

Steven sat down on the steps, and then noticed, vaguely, the way you picked up on a car coming at you just before an accident, that he’d just blocked a furious Joe from going at Laura. Whatever. What the fuck ever, because he couldn’t care less about either of them right now. “They fucking looked at it and they said I was fucked, Laura. And that was basically like having my guts carved out with a teaspoon, so excuse me if I don’t want to go through that again.”

“Yeah, well, what if they were screwing with you?” she said. She was still keeping half an eye on Joe, her hand deep in her purse, probably on her Taser, but she was trying to modulate her voice to—to persuasive. “They wanted you off drugs.”

“Then they would’ve told him he was fine so long as he stayed off them, not that it didn’t matter whether he was on them or not,” Joe said. “And what the hell did you mean—”

“—just stop acting like nobody can do anything for him but you, Perry—”

Fuck this. Steven got up and got out of their way. He needed space and time to think, and he wasn’t getting it here, and the dubious benefit of being not high was being able to realize what he really needed.

They were blocking him from going downstairs so Steven went up. When he heard one of them yell at him, he stopped off on that landing and went into the next floor, and found himself facing a giant Buddha. He looked off to the side and the sign on the wall offered him therapeutic services. Sometimes Steven did think that somebody up there wanted to fuck with him.

“Steven,” Joe said behind him.

“You know, as great for my ego as it is that you’re madly in love with me, it’s probably equally as bad for my codependency issues,” Steven said. “I think therapist number three wants to talk about that. I’ve been ducking and weaving for a couple sessions now, but it’s starting to hit crisis stage, probably.”

Joe heaved a breath out of him like he was using a shovel to do it. “I’m not madly in love with you.”

“Right, you just get really offended by anybody who acts like they want to have sex with me.”

“Steven, that’s a _normal_ reaction,” Joe said. He kicked the door. “I came up to talk about the whole ENT and Laura being a presumptuous bitch thing.”

“Yeah, well, she’s a presumptuous bitch, and I’ve been relying on her a lot, telling her my troubles, thinking she was going to be a friend but she basically just sold out my feelings for her fantasies of fixing me, because everybody wants to fix me and nobody just wants to let me fucking _be_ me,” Steven said. He turned around, then flopped down into a cross-legged sit on the floor. “Conversation’s done.”

Joe looked down at Steven. He pulled his hands out of his jacket pockets, then shoved them back in. Then he sighed and pulled one back out to put down on the floor as he took the spot in front of Steven. “Is this about the glass I broke?”

“Perry,” Steven started. Then he gave up and dropped down over his legs, splaying his elbows against the floor. He grabbed at his head and pressed his nose harder into his crossed ankles. “Look, I really, really, _really_ like sex.”

“And you fuck anything that moves, you’re not really stable in any sense, and you don’t have regular ideas about boundaries, let alone relationships. Steven, you already rehash all your sessions on the way home,” Joe muttered. He shifted around, leather coat creaking, and then tapped Steven on the back of the head. “Why do you think I’m such an asshole, anyway?”

Steven lifted his head and slid his good hand under it to prop it up. “Oh, thought you were born that way, honestly.”

The right side of Joe’s mouth twitched up, and he had to work for a moment to get that back into line with the rest of his moody face. “For the record, you know, for your therapy, I’m not looking to fix you.” He rolled his eyes at Steven’s snort. “I can’t help getting mad at you any more than you can help being a dick, Steven. And you are really, really a dick. But I can’t say that I didn’t have plenty of warning about that.”

“And you’re still here,” Steven said. He pushed himself up, then grimaced as his back decided to pop. “So how’s it feel to be crazier than me?”

Joe grinned at that, glancing off to the side. Just a quick, sarcastic twist of his mouth. “You’re not really somebody who appreciates sanity anyway.”

“No, I do. I do.” Steven looked down at his hands. The bandages were getting dirty again, with flapping ends and edges because the damn things itched and Steven couldn’t keep himself from picking at them. “You need a little bit of sanity around, you know. Something to come back to once you’re done flying, so you remember where and what and who you are. It’s just I don’t really get that, because most sane people aren’t going to bother staying around and waiting for the crazy guy.”

They sat in silence for about ten seconds, and then the elevator chimed. Steven looked over and a very carefully put-together, very rich-looking woman looked back at him, then gingerly picked past him and Joe to the door of the spa. They could hear her asking someone inside whether they knew there were random suspicious-looking men out in the hall.

“Tom is going to throw us out again if we get arrested, and Laura’s pissed at us now so we can’t crash with her,” Joe said, starting to get up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“If he looks at my throat and says he can’t do anything, it’s going to really hurt. Really hurt. I mean, that first time, it took me about three days to really understand, because every time I thought I was all the way down as far as I could go, I just…kept going,” Steven said. He bit his lip, then looked up as Joe sat back down. “It’ll be a bitch. But—you know, if he looks in there and says maybe he can do something?”

Joe leaned back on his hands, then pushed himself forward till his head was nearly in Steven’s lap. Then he straightened up and watched Steven. “Okay.”

“Yeah, okay.” Steven took a deep breath, deep enough to make his head spin a little, and then blew it out. “Okay. Okay, let’s go back down.”

* * *

When they called the other guys, nobody said anything for a good two minutes. Laura, still touchy as hell but mostly forgiving, sitting off to the side and Joe bobbing his head like that was going to make the phone speaker amplifying absolutely nothing all that much louder, and then Steven with this giant fucking knot of hell in his stomach, just waiting to get cut loose on him.

*It’s your choice, Steven,* Tom finally said. *We’re not there, and anyway, it’s not—it’s your body. If you think he can do it—*

“Yeah, that’s the thing,” Steven said, and was surprised that his voice was so steady. “If I think so, but then what if I don’t think so?”

*Well, we’re already living that one.* Tom muttered something to somebody, probably Brad. *Steven. Just make up your goddamn mind first. Whatever comes out of that, we’ll deal.*

Steven sat down and then realized he was already sitting down. He grabbed at the chair arm to steady himself while that knot in his gut got a little smaller. “Okay. Well, okay, then. That’s what we’ll do.”

* * *

Wild advances in modern medicine were still sticking shit down Steven’s throat to cut him up, on purpose. He got a shitload of paper from the doctor and then spent about two days online, vacuuming up everything he could get. Even videos. Even videos of operations gone really, terribly wrong. Joe got fed up enough to talk Joey into trying to hold Steven down while Joe pried away the computer, and they ended up with a broken door, Joey taking off to lick his wounds at his girlfriend’s place, and Joe sulking up on the roof with his guitar.

Steven decided to do it.

Then he decided not to do it, and then he decided to do it and he texted Laura to set up the appointment before he could change his mind. Then he threw up a couple of times and thought maybe he shouldn’t do it, but he couldn’t find his phone and his stomach hurt too much for him to look for more than a couple minutes, so he crawled back to bed and decided he’d call it off in the morning.

In the morning he was going with it again. By the time noon rolled around, he’d scared off Brad and Tom was threatening to go back on drugs if Steven changed his mind one more fucking time. Steven told him to fuck off, got halfway through lunch and then threw that all up again.

Joe showed up while he was still hanging his head over the toilet. “Shit,” he said from the door.

Steven put his head on the seat rim. The cool plastic felt pretty decent against his face, and it made it easier for him to wipe off his mouth, since he could prop his shaky hand up on the rim too. “Yep.”

“Look, let’s get out of here and not think about it,” Joe said. “I don’t have work this week.”

“Where the hell are we going to go?” Steven said, twisting around to look at him. “Everybody’s going to ask about it and I can’t fucking deal with that right now.”

Joe cocked his head. “How would they know?”

“Well, I might’ve blast-messaged my whole contact list on the last seesaw,” Steven admitted. He dropped the soiled clump of toilet paper into the bowl, then flapped around till he hit the flusher. “Yeah, I _know_.”

Instead of telling him what he already knew, Joe just sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “Okay, well, then we’ll go out of town.”

“Where?”

* * *

The beach. Joe borrowed a car, or maybe temporarily stole it, not like Steven was really paying attention or would disapprove. It was the off-season and all the houses were dark and empty, lined up on the edge of the sand and waiting for them to pick one. They got a nice two-story, with a big back porch facing the water and even some leftover beer in the fridge that they sadly, both of them watching the other hesitate, dumped down the sink.

It was also too cold to go in the water, and not like they’d had time to really pack for it either, but Steven wanted to get at least his feet in there. Go to the beach, need to feel the sea. He rolled up his jeans and lasted about ten seconds before he hopped back out, while Joe stood up above the high water mark and laughed at him. So Steven dragged the fucker down there, and they ended up dunking each other, and then had to walk freezing and dripping back to the house.

Maybe halfway there it occurred to Steven that it was an empty beach and wet cold jeans blew, and by the three-quarter point he’d stripped off his jeans, nearly pitching himself into the sand head-first in the process. By the time they got to the porch, they were making out like teenagers on the way back from prom. 

The porch was sandy. And made of wood. And sandy. They fucked on it anyway, cursing at the splinters, spitting out the grit in between eating out each other’s mouths, and it was ridiculously, criminally good. 

“You wanna talk about jealousy, I should hate whoever the hell got to you first,” Steven said, stretching out on the bed. He propped his feet up on the pillows and twisted around so he could see into the bathroom, where Joe was standing over the sink, damp sweat-pants curling up snug to his ass, and still trying to shake sand out of his hair. “But I don’t, because I have an open mind and an open heart and am just happy to take the fruits of their labor.”

“I didn’t figure out I wanted to _fuck_ you right away.” Joe looked at Steven, obviously expecting the bruise to Steven’s pride and amused as hell about it. Then he went back to digging at his scalp with his nails. “I had about two months in between the break-up and when I could get back to the U.S., and I kind of went around, to be honest. Because I don’t, when I’m with somebody. I never really had done that before.”

Steven listened hard, but he didn’t hear any kind of accusation or implied elbow-jab or guilt-trip in there. Just was like Joe was talking to himself, really. “Enjoy yourself?”

“Yeah.” After a moment, Joe raised his head. He shook his hand over the sink, looking into the mirror, and then turned on the tap with his wrist and ran his fingers under it. “Yeah. I guess you need to do it once, get it out of your system.”

“So when did you want to fuck me?”

Joe turned off the water and turned away to dry his hand on the towel. Then he came out of the bathroom and over to the bed, looking down at Steven. “Didn’t therapist one say something about not feeding your narcissism complex?”

“Didn’t you say you didn’t want to fix me?” Steven countered.

“That’s not fixing, that’s refusing to enable,” Joe said.

Steven rolled onto his back and flicked the other man off, then let his arms swing over his head and hang down the end of the bed. “I knew they were going to assign you one sooner or later. So what do they say about me?”

The bed dipped unexpectedly low as Joe climbed onto it. They both froze for a second, adjusting, and then Joe just used the bad springs to push him right into Steven. His leg slid right over Steven’s and hooked down, pinning Steven’s knee, and his head made itself comfortable on Steven’s shoulder, so Steven let that arm come back and lie across Joe’s back. “I don’t talk to them about you,” Joe said.

“Why not? Am I not important enough?” Steven said.

“Fucking attention addict,” Joe mumbled. “Because you talk to the fucking shrink about what’s wrong with you or your life that you want to change.”

“Come on,” Steven said, after a long moment.

Joe moved his head, mostly so his jaw, which might be photogenic as hell but which was honestly made out of cement, could numb another part of Steven’s chest. “You can fuck around or tick me off some other way, go nuts, whatever you want to try, Steven. Not everything that makes you mad in life is a mistake.”

“Sure you’re not madly in love with me?” Steven said.

Joe lifted his head and looked at Steven. Just on the level, knowing what he knew and not giving a damn what anyone else knew or thought of it, because he could be both annoying and astounding that way. “Not madly.”

“I actually haven’t fucked around on you, which you know, because even if you’re jealous of Laura, you two gossip like sluts finger themselves, and she’s a fucking spymaster with Facebook and GPS and all that shit. We should totally hire her when we’ve got money, by the way,” Steven shifted around, then checked on his hand. His fingers were finally not hurting, but the splints were still on because that doctor didn’t want to take any chances, given what Steven’s bandages always looked like at check-ups. “You know, I had this really long talk with therapist three last session, where we went over how what looks like flirting can sometimes just be a defensive mechanism, like it’s a role you play and present to the world, and people react to the role so that spares you the effort of actually connecting with them as yourself, and basically—”

“Yeah, I know, that’s when I realized you actually hadn’t noticed that I was interested in _fucking_ you,” Joe muttered.

“—and because your idea of flirting looks like cruel and unusual punishment to even us abnormal kids, motherfucker, and I’m going somewhere else with this,” Steven said. “And basically, I flirt with people I’m not comfortable with. So there.”

After another moment, Joe dragged up his head again. “Are you saying you being an asshole is a sign of affection?”

“Some of the time, yeah, probably.” Steven slid his arm off Joe onto the bed and used it to roll himself up onto his side. “Well, also, fucking is a sign of affection. I’m pretty sure.”

Joe rolled his eyes and then shoved Steven back onto the mattress. It was heavy petting for a good long while, just messing around, hand teasing between your legs, sucking mouth, playing around with the sore places. Still sand in Joe’s hair that caught under Steven’s nails when he was pressing the other man up against the footboard, rubbing his cock into Joe’s leg. 

“You know, if we’re gonna do this getaway properly, you should’ve brought up your guitar,” Steven said. “Play me a love song and all that.”

“Yeah, because you’ll be waiting for it so you can laugh your ass off,” Joe snorted. He closed his eyes as Steven worked one hand down his pants, stretching up his neck, lazy and pleasured. “I was going crazy when I first got here, trying to get you to—”

“So now I’m asking you to, and you’re gonna hold out? You’re a cold son of a bitch, Perry.” Steven licked up the underside of Joe’s throat, then let his teeth catch behind Joe’s ear. “I think I mentioned once that I was born and raised under a classical piano concerto? You’re the one who gets all snobby about a decent melody.”

Joe hissed, twisting his head further back. His hips pushed up towards Steven’s hand. He got his other hand down and began tugging down the sweat-pants. “No, it’s—look, at this point, might as well wait till it’s all the guys. You know, hear the whole fucking thing how it should be. Next practice.”

“Narcissist complex, your therapist ever bring up that one?” Steven said. “You’re so damn sure you’re the last piece for this band.”

“Because I am,” Joe said, leaning back. All flushed on the cheeks and brow, breathing short, hair sticking to his face, and in the middle of that two dark certain eyes and they were absolutely the most molten of them all. “What do you think I’m waiting on you for?”

Steven laughed, more of a jagged breath than anything else, but it got to the other man, way deep into those eyes. They flared mad, then went to something—else. Even hotter. Joe pushed him over, then rolled on top of Steven and really started going at it, and Steven wasn’t going to fuck around laughing with that.

* * *

It was a nice life. Kick around on the beach or lounge on the porch, occasionally go inside to eat. Watch stupid TV. Fuck wherever, and then, if it was a halfway-comfortable spot anyway, just not get up. Nobody else around to yell at them or make them move along, or stare at them if yeah, they just curled up in bed, Joe’s hair always getting up in Steven’s face and Joe always bitching about Steven’s fidgeting, but then, when he was relaxed enough, Joe turning into this long slack stretch of warm flesh, just twisting around Steven and keeping him company. It was nice.

He had thoughts sometimes, he had to admit, about whether sober was really worth it, or whether he would’ve traded all this clear thinking and reliable remembering for just getting up there in front of the band again and doing what he was meant to do. Everybody talked about how it was better to live with the knowing than to have never had the knowing, but fuck, getting high sometimes literally meant getting really fucking high up there, in every way, with every aspect or yourself, and he had that knowledge too. Just knowing what the view had been like from up there, when now he was shuffling around down here with everyone else.

And that was why it was nice to remember why you came back down, and why that wasn’t always just a straight up crash-and-burn terror zone. Because the drugs really didn’t give you that, really didn’t let you just stare down and work through your awful shit and get all the way to the end—you always jumped ship during the awful because it was just easier that way, felt better to just go back to feeling good, and then you forgot that the awful was going to get out of the way eventually, without the drugs. And then, and then you just could lie there and think about how you’d gotten this too and maybe it wasn’t way high but it was low and serene and beautiful too and damn it, you _earned_ this shit. You didn’t just buy it off the street.

So it was nice. Steven went with it, let it just soak into his soul and stretch that out however it wanted to go. He got used to the hair in his mouth, the half-hearted mumbling in his ear, the hand just curling over the rise of his hip. He figured out how to fit his knees up against Joe’s shins and where his hand should go when he was laying his arm over the other man’s shoulders. He was okay with all of that, and it was nice. 

* * *

Steven did not throw up on the day of his surgery. He did go over and over the voice therapy—at this rate he was going to have a full alphabet of therapies under his belt—exercises he’d been given till he distinctly heard someone cheering when the nurse said it was time for the anesthesia. Which was local, motherfuckers, so he certainly could still gesture. At least till the nurse, who was the same hardass he’d met the first time at the office, informed him that they could offer him the option of strapping his hands down if he couldn’t control himself.

It was over faster than he thought it would be. He had been concentrating on the laser machine, which he had to admit wasn’t quite as cool-looking as he’d been expecting, and then the doctor tapped him on the shoulder, reminded him to shut up when he opened his mouth, and told him he was good to go. Sort of.

He wasn’t allowed to talk for the next couple of weeks. This was a problem, even if he had his phone and his laptop and about a gazillion different kinds of notepads and mini dry-erase boards and sticky notes because he had friends who genuinely felt for his pain and suffering and intuited exactly what was going to bug the shit out of him, and mostly they were good for tossing at the heads of the assholes in his fucking band.

“Jesus, Steven,” Joey said, ducking without even looking up. He popped open the rice cooker and began making little brown mounds in the collection of misfit bowls before him. “I thought they said no noises whatsoever. That includes little baby squeals, or whatever the hell that was.”

Steven wasn’t allowed to have his phone during meals right now, because that one had landed in the soup and thrown off a giant shower of sparks as the battery had gone, and so he had to get off his chair and go get the notepad he’d just tossed at the other man. He scribbled on it and then held it up.

“He’s talking to you,” Joe said from the stove. Not looking up either, because something about fisherman’s stew demanded total visual attention despite that shit looking like shit—tasty as hell, but still, not winning any beauty contests—but in a useful, non-insulting way. “Look at it before he has another fit, okay? I’m busy here.”

“Yeah, we’re grateful that you’re not personally examining the progress of the back of his mouth for once.” Joey sighed, read Steven’s message—which had two addendums by this point—and then threw up his hands. “What the fuck am I supposed to do about it?”

Steven flipped the page and scratched the letters into the paper. Literally scratched them, having to smooth back parts the pen-tip ripped up so it was readable. Then he turned it towards Joey.

“I’m not fucking going back up there right now! We were up there for three fucking hours, Steven!” Joey grabbed a bowl of rice and spun it so hard at Steven that it banged off Steven’s arm, ricocheted into a box of cereal and then would’ve hit the floor if Brad hadn’t walked in and grabbed it.

Brad promptly walked right back out, conflict-avoidant fucker that he was. Joe sighed and put down his Suzy homemaker wooden spoon. “What?”

“And it’s freezing out, and my fucking fingers were going to ice over, and I just can’t fucking play it any tighter, okay? I’m trying to do it how you want, but I can’t fucking—I can’t fucking hear the cue and I need to hear the cue and you can’t just fucking _wave_ your fucking hands and cue me, you flap all over the damn place and I can’t.” Joey fell back against the counter and grabbed his head in both hands. “I can’t, okay? I can’t do it as good as you want.”

Steven lifted the pen, then sighed and put it down and put his head in his hands. He massaged his temples. His elbow bumped the pen and he looked over at that, then swallowed down his growl—no fucking stresses at all, total relaxation in his throat, Jesus, did they know how actual people functioned? he was going to fucking explode at this point—and ripped off the first couple sheets from his pad. Wadded them up and tossed them without thinking and then Joe was glaring at him because one of the wads had unintentionally nearly ruined Joe’s goddamn family heirloom soup.

Tom walked in halfway through an exasperated face. “I should know better by now, but what’s going on?”

“Is this about the new one?” Joe said.

“Yes, it’s the fucking new one,” Joey snapped, jerking his hands down, his head up. “Steven wants to put, like, a sax in there, so he wants to make up a demo to give to this sax guy we know. He taped the piano part and we’re trying to lay down the drums, okay, but I can’t fucking hear his fucking laptop speakers when the wind’s like, a fucking tornado up there.”

“We really should just sneak downstairs and toss out that goddamn junk in the basement,” Tom said. “Seeing as, you know, we’re still temporarily banned from using our usual practice spots because—”

_Total unfair discrimination_ , Steven wrote. _Kiss-in tomorrow Laura’s working on more protests fixed in a week._

Tom raised his brows. “Well, great, though I honestly think fucking the way you guys do would be validly prohibited obscenity even if you swiped Terry’s make-up and put on your fake boobs again.”

“What?” Joe said, more sharply.

“Halloween last year, Steven was rocking some really insane meth, multiple solicitation charges. Tell you later,” Joey said, turning around. He seemed to be calming down, at least enough to get interested in using utensils.

“Anyway, why haven’t we ever used the basement?” Joe went on, after a couple blinks to adjust his whatever-world coolness levels. “It looks plenty big, once you get out that metal thing in the middle.”

Steven and Joey both sighed. “That metal thing is the master thesis of an art student who lives on the second floor,” Joey explained. “Gary might love us, but he loves the extra hundred a month he gets for letting that stay there.”

_Also pretty sure this guy’s a serial killer_ , Steven wrote. _Brad saw him chasing a naked bloody guy with a blowtorch in the backalley once. And I might have._

“Steven macked on the guy’s girlfriend or sister six months ago at a block party.” Joey flipped off Steven’s glower and began eating his rice. “Shut up, Steven, you knew what you were doing. Even if we’re still not sure if—”

_Actually I think she might’ve been both of those?_ Then Steven shrugged at their collective raised brows. _I don’t know right before rehab shit’s really really fuzzy then. But anyw_ scratch out _anyhoo yeah really need to record it as a group piecemeal shit is not working._

Tom rubbed at the side of his face. “So where?”

“I could try asking Douglas,” Joe said slowly. He twisted the spoon around in his hand. “They’re renovating a couple of the studios, so just electric plugs, but it’s space.”

_Friends at work?_ Steven wrote. _Honey share!!!_

Joe stopped twisting the spoon so he could turn around and literally stab it into the stew, figuratively symbolizing that he had somebody to hunt, kill and mount. “I found what it was. One of the guys in my other band, turns out his brother is a keyboard guy for Douglas.”

“Oh, your one in England,” Tom said. Casually, just clarifying things, even opening the fridge and looking for something while he was doing it. “So whatever happened to that, anyway?”

While he wasn’t Brad, Joey had a related conflicts issue, in that he typically wasn’t too tuned into the undercurrents and thus tended to miss shit all the time. It was endearing in that it usually made him the one guy who didn’t know enough to not talk to the rest of them, but it was also constantly frustrating in that Steven ended up dragging Joey’s ass out of danger way more than he ever got credit for. Like right then, when Joey moved like he was going to push Joe out of the way and serve himself some stew, and Steven had to toss his pen at Joey’s head.

“The hell?” Joey said.

“Why are you being a dick?” Joe said.

Joey looked, really looked at Joe’s face, and then backed the fuck up. Over at the fridge, Tom straightened up and folded his arm across the top of the fridge door. “Being a dick?” Tom said. “About what? Understanding why those guys might be pissed at you for ditching them?”

_Oh hell wait a fu_ Steven scribbled. Thank God for bulk pen packs.

Ignoring him, except for a totally token pat on the shoulder, Joey hustled himself out of the kitchen. Steven looked after the yellow-bellied son of a bitch, then sighed and lifted his pen.

“Shut up,” Joe said to him, while looking hard at Tom. “Listen, what the hell do you want me to do? I already said I was sorry for not giving you guys more warning.”

“Not sorry you went,” Tom observed.

“No. No, I’m not. I think it was good for me. It helped me figure out a lot of things that I don’t think I would’ve figured out, or that at least would’ve taken a lot longer.” Still looking at Tom, Joe let go of the spoon and then dropped his hand, just missing the gas flames, to the knob to turn down the heat. Then he stepped backwards to lean against the counter. “So yeah, okay, I’m sorry that it wasn’t I fucked up and realized it and came crawling back to you, going on and on about how I was so wrong, baby, and I need you to save me. Just not how it went, Tom.”

Steven waved his pad.

“I’m talking to—” Tom said irritably, glancing over, and then he went back to his ranting. “Nobody’s saying they want that. I’m just saying, what was good for you might have really fucking ticked the rest of us off, and it’d be nice if you got out of your ass once in a while and noticed.”

“You might’ve been ticked off but it worked out, didn’t it?” Joe snapped. “I don’t know what you’re so fucking mad about now.”

“Because I’m just a little concerned, now that you’ve got Steven over on your side, that you’ll fucking do it again,” Tom snapped back. “So—”

Steven chucked the fucking pad at Tom’s head. The paper flying off one side skewed its flight path and made it easy for Tom to fend it off with one arm, not that Tom appreciated it. On the contrary, he looked like Steven had just gone off and stabbed him with at least a fork, maybe even going up to steak knife territory. Then he pulled back on himself, slammed the fridge, and made a big old grand gesture Steven’s way, like—oh, fuck, no, he was not using Steven as a fucking prop in his own fucking—

The pad was over there. Steven was over here. No talking. No talking because it really, really _mattered_ , even more than his band being assholes to the point of real consequential stupidity, and it _blew_.

“Well, what do you want me to say?” Joe asked, while Steven was going through all the ways that God currently was trying to screw with him. “That I’m never going to leave?”

“Oh, no.” Tom laughed, a real nasty little piece of sarcasm. “You’re going to take your ass wherever you think the chair’s worthy. I know you. And that’s fine. It’s a free country, and there’s no point in making you play where you don’t want to. But there’s just the one thing, all right? Because it wasn’t too bad when you were just following Steven around like some kicked puppy, but now you’re always off together and you act like you’re the only one who’s ever fucking looked after him.”

Joe opened his mouth to rip one out and then shut it because Steven had kicked his chair into the stove. Both Joe and Tom jumped, and then Tom had to twist out of the way because the chair leg—which was loose anyway, veteran of a couple hundred of these incidents by now—came off and sent the chair crashing over. The leg itself bounced off the other way, catching Steven’s foot so he nearly tripped into the fridge. He didn’t give a shit; he got hold of the handle and stayed upright enough to start rearranging the fridge poetry magnets.

Halfway through he thought he heard the fuckers walking out on him and reached back with one hand. His just newly-non-splinted fingers, which he was supposed to be going easy on too but whatever, he knew people who could set those again if they had to. Not so much anyone who could reset a broken band. So Steven got Tom and shoved him into the island, and then flapped his arm till Joe came over, falling for the old can’t-keep-his-balance trick, and locked that arm around the first leg of Joe’s he got.

_he and I sleep our bed_  
_but I sing you him they play_  
_only us dream all together_  
_ugly urge s stop the symphony_  
_you as s_  


They stared at it for long enough so that Steven reached up twice because he thought of a better way to phrase it and then had to sit on his hand, because this wasn’t a song. This was just trying to fucking shoot this in the head before it got dangerous.

“You really think Steven would come with me?” Joe said.

“I think if you asked him—no, you would ask him, because that’s what you’re like with people you’re serious about, and if he was pissed off at us and that does happen a lot, he’d think about it just because he thinks about any way he can use to get back at people. Actually, now that I’ve brought it up, he’s definitely going to consider it,” Tom said. He pushed the hair out of his face and looked down, then grinned sourly. “Yeah, you are, Steven. And no, I think you’re fucking Steven, not fucking Joe’s stooge, but basically I’d like to know—”

“I’m right here,” Joe said, frowning when Steven flipped him off.

“—if it’s going to come up and we’ll have to, I don’t know, at least contemplate it.” Tom rubbed the side of his face, pained written under his fingers. “Shit comes up and you can’t see that coming and I get that. But I went through a lot of shit with Steven that you weren’t around for, and also a lot of shit with you that Steven missed, too, and I guess I’d just like some sign that people remember.”

_do recall_ , Steven arranged on the fridge.

Joe glanced down, then put his elbow up against the fridge and leaned his head on that hand. “I’m sober, man,” he said. He paused, then snorted, his mouth twisting up in a wry smile. “I know I left you, and I know I came back to you. It’s not like I’ve been acting like I was never gone.”

“Yeah, there was a gap, and it sucks even more, looking back on it sober,” Tom said.

“Well, I wasn’t sober when I went. If it comes up again, I’ll do it clean. I learned that, all right, and I’m not going to be forgetting it,” Joe replied after a long moment. “And Steven’s got a mouth he can use. Don’t know why he’d need mine.”

Steven was hitting Joe’s knee, even though he got that Joe meant that in a reasonably supportive way. Then, since they were paying attention to him again, he pointed to the new lines on the fridge:

_friend through death man_  
_rock ing time together_  
_love storm music pink life_  
  


“Pink life?” Tom said. The motherfucker’s mouth was twitching at the corners. “I hope to God these aren’t new lyrics.”

“So should I ask about that space?” Joe said.

Tom pulled back, still just a little too raw for that, and Steven went to hit Joe again. But before he’d done more than lift his hand, Tom shrugged and opened the fridge. He got out a bottle of water, kicking the broken chair off into the far corner, and then headed out of the kitchen. “Yeah, if you can get it. Might as well start practicing again while Steven can’t torture us.”

“I don’t think he’s going to come back and look at it,” Joe said.

_honey please blow my butt_ , Steven adjusted, adding the first word.

Joe looked at the magnets, then at Steven. Then he leaned against the fridge, scratching his forehead and pretending to think. “I thought we weren’t allowed to fuck in here. You know, germs and all that.”

Steven looked at the magnets, then blew out an irritated breath and made a note to buy the erotic and/or expletive set just in case this situation ever came up again. It was so goddamn annoying, not having the ones he needed.

He was still looking at them when Joe pried his hand off the other man’s knee, and then kept hold of Steven’s arm to pull him up onto his feet. Steven’s nose passed _sordid_ , hanging out alone on the top half of the fridge for some reason, and he put his hand out for it, suddenly thinking of something, and ended up using it for support when Joe kissed him. Just—really hard at first, almost too painful to like, and then abruptly easing back, and taking such a long time about it that Steven had to push at him to get room to breathe and avoid passing out.

Not that much, just space for air, and Joe seemed fine with that, keeping so close that his hair curtained them off from the rest of the world. Inside he, as far as Steven could tell given poor light and bad perspective, had his eyes closed and wasn’t scowling. “So you’d at least think about it,” he finally said. He lifted his head and looked at Steven, so then Steven could actually see him too, and got about as much of a clue as to where the man was going as that toneless voice of his had given. “I kind of don’t know about that.”

Steven opened his mouth and Joe snapped out of whatever the fuck mood to stiffen up, like Steven didn’t already remember by himself. He shut his mouth, indulging in at least an annoyed grunt—Joe pushed him for that—and then began looking around for that damn pad. And his pen. And just something to fucking make this fucking less awkward.

“Okay, well, yeah, because of them. Tom’s probably got that right,” Joe added, snapping right back into his weird mood. He looked at Steven again, then glanced over his shoulder at the stove. “That fucking room better be available.”

Steven stopped looking for the pad and hooked his arm over Joe’s neck just as the other man tried to go back to his fucking stew, like that seriously was that important. He didn’t get it, not totally, but he made Joe drag him to the stove, and then he leaned onto the other man’s back, watching over Joe’s shoulder as, hallelujah, stew was finally in a fit state to be transferred to bowls. After a couple sharp shoulder-twists, Joe gave up on throwing him off, and eventually the man even relaxed into it. Just sighed and reached back and moved Steven a little left, and then tilted his head when Steven laid his on Joe’s shoulder.

“Okay,” Joe said. “Fine. That’s how it is, so just show up to this fucking practice, okay?”

Steven dug his chin into Joe’s shoulder when he nodded, and Joe finally let out that snarl he’d been swallowing since Tom had walked out. He stood there for another moment, then dragged Steven around to make him eat the stew. It was pretty tasty, all right, but they both knew it wasn’t much of a stand-in.

* * *

_TYLER: So I finally got to hear Joe play with the band, one of my songs, and it was just…_  
_PERRY: It was such a fucking pain to get to that point, but it was worth it. Everything else afterward just came from that._  
_TYLER: It was just right. That was what it was. I can’t put it in better words._

Not everybody was convinced about Laura in general yet, but they all basically agreed that she’d at least earned the right to come along and watch one practice. She and Steven sacked down on the piles of electrical wiring dumped in one corner by the workmen renovating the place, with Laura balancing a flat-screen monitor on her lap that was hooked up to the laptop perched in front of Steven. Supposedly it’d be big enough for the guys to see what he was typing, if they weren’t going to be assholes about ignoring him again.

Some of the other musicians working in Douglas’ studios dropped in to help cart in their equipment and set it up, and then stuck around, filling out what little space was left in the room. It didn’t look like any of them were too close to Joe—there were multiple double-takes when Joe, annoyed at Steven’s poking at his goddamn amp’s settings, told Steven to knock it off or get fucked over it—but he couldn’t be as fucking antisocial as he made out if they were willing to hang around. Maybe he should start dropping by Joe’s sessions, Steven thought.

They warmed up with their old practice standbys, a couple really early Stones songs and then Chain Reaction’s first single. Joe was good, definitely had talent, but his damn A-string was out of tune again because Steven had been messing with the laptop when Joe had been checking that and hadn’t double-checked it. That plus he was taking some liberties on the solos, which was fine if you knew what you were doing but his style just wasn’t meshing with those songs and frankly, it didn’t even look like he was trying to make it mesh.

“Well, anything nice to say?” Tom said after a second. He looked at the monitor, then at Joe, who was too busy cranking up the volume on his sour fucking guitar to see what Steven thought. Then he looked at Steven again, gesturing for Steven to not be so mean.

Steven rolled his eyes, because come the fuck on, nice never got anybody to play right, but acknowledged that Joe at least was meshing well with the rest of the band, and especially with Brad. They had been playing together for months now, but that was no guarantee that musicians, especially guitarists, were going to be able to lean on each other. Brad and Ray had never really figured each other out, despite Steven’s best efforts, but Joe was already going long stretches without so much as a look at Brad for cues. 

Joe wasn’t looking at Steven either as he walked back into his spot, idly strumming a couple chords. He ignored the pen Steven flicked at him, signaling Joey to start up for the next song—the new one—like he was the fucking bandleader, and if he wanted to talk about getting fucked over the goddamn amp—

This one wasn’t done beyond a piano laying down the basic melody-harmony and the drum track Steven had eventually done himself, just to give everybody an idea of the drive he wanted. No guitar yet. Definitely no massive, roaring riff right out of the gate like somebody had just driven his hand deep into your body and closed his fingers and then pulled up and out, taking all the strings of you with it. Just made you go slack, listening to it, those strings yanking you flat while the music kept on running through you, demanding that you give in to it and then demanding that you give more, more, even more, till you didn’t have anything but Lord, oh, Lord, it kept coming.

“Steven?” Someone pushed him in the arm. “Steven, Joe just asked what you thought.”

Steven blinked. He wasn’t hearing it anymore, he vaguely realized. At least not with his ears, he wasn’t hearing it, but he still had it going through his head and his gut and his fucking cock, his whole fucking body, because yes, fuck, _God_. That was a fucking revelation.

He looked up, then down. Then he shoved the laptop over and jumped Joe. Which still was a really inadequate response, but it was a hell of a lot better than words.

“Steven!” “Jesus!” “ _Jesus_.” “Whoa, hey, wait, shouldn’t somebody…”

So Joe was now on the floor, on his back, guitar strings cutting through Steven’s shirt, grunting and kind of moving like maybe he’d hurt something, but it wasn’t bad enough for him to _not_ be into their mouth-fucking, so Steven just fisted his hands deeper into Joe’s hair and kept at that. Jesus fucking Christ, that song was going to be so fucking good when they—

“Huh?” Joe mumbled, staring up at Steven. He raised one hand and caught at Steven’s shoulder, half-hearted, then batted it down Steven’s back. “Hey, what…why…”

Steven spotted the pen he’d thrown earlier, grabbed it, and then began scribbling on a piece of paper that Laura had just crawled over and given to him, bless her for being the lunatic devotee to his insanity that she was. He stopped as his brain froze up—so fucking frustrating, but okay, right, had just been completely unreservedly blown to pieces two seconds ago—then shoved at the neck of Joe’s guitar. First Joe looked bitchy about it, and then he got it and he played a piece of the riff. That word came back and Steven jabbed it down so hard that he tore a hole in the paper.

“So…this is how you write songs?” said someone. “You all take turns with him, or what?”

“Hey, motherfucker, how about you shut your fuckhole?” Joey called out.

Ignoring it, Steven got down the words, poking Joe for one more replay, and then breathed. He had to put his hand down as his head spun on an acute tilt. Then he shook his head till that cleared up and he could look at the paper. Nearly the whole song there. Jesus.

“Hey.” Joe tugged at the guitar, maneuvering it out from between them, and then handed it off to somebody. Then he collapsed back against the floor and looked up at Steven. “Hey, so can I play with you or what?”

The motherfucker. He was grinning his ass off, like the smuggest, most full of himself, biggest motherfucker to ever walk the earth. And he _was_ the biggest motherfucker, and he just—he just was _right_.

“Hey,” Joe said again, his smile fading. “Steven?”

Steven put his head down. Yeah, on Joe, curling up over the other man, ear to heartbeat, wrapping up his hands in the man’s shirt. He had to just lie there and breathe, and just feel how it was like, having it all fall into place. He was so used to everything falling apart around him, pieces flying around like shrapnel, ducking and running for cover, and then there was just this perfect calm order in his life, all of a sudden. It took some taking in.

“No,” Joe said. He’d put his arm over Steven’s back at some point, fingers lightly spread across the spine, and Steven sensed his other arm waving around above them. “Yeah, asshole, middle finger means fuck off. So why don’t you?”

“Are we getting thrown out again?” Brad sighed.

Joe moved up a little, paused, and then pushed himself onto his arm when Steven loosened his grip. He dropped his other arm to loop around Steven’s waist. “So fucking what?”

“Even so, still the best practice ever,” Joey said. “I mean, we got through a whole song and Steven didn’t find a thing wrong with it.”

* * *

They had to cut practice short and barely got out of there with the recordings. It was a little dodgy for a while, but Joe ended up keeping the gig at Douglas’ studios. They had been in there after-hours, after all, so it wasn’t like they’d been fucking around on paid time, and also, one of the guys who’d come by was way up there with a competing label and had really liked what he’d heard. He passed along the word to his bosses, who let it slip to what was still technically the band’s label, and the upshot was that their manager actually paid a house visit.

Business talks were a bitch. Joe liked Peter even less after meeting him, and the rest of the guys were…surprisingly bitter as well, considering that for long stretches of time Steven hadn’t even been sure that they still knew they had a manager. He’d been the only one trying to talk to Peter.

“And it’s just.” Steven stopped himself, recollected his exercises and tried to modulate his voice. He got to talk now, but seeing as it was only a few more days till they got to test out singing, he absolutely positively did not want to screw himself up. “It’s hard, okay? We already ended up leaving back a lot of good people.”

“Yeah, good people,” Joe muttered, leaning back against the wall. They’d taken off the top bunk and put it down by the bottom one, then topped it off with a double mattress scavenged from some relocating college students, so now Joe could have his guitar and Steven could have his laptop and new electronic keyboard, and Joe could yank out Steven’s earbuds whenever he thought Steven needed to stop tuning him out, because apparently before he was incapable of climbing the ladder and doing that. You took the bad with the good. “That, I get. But I don’t see the problem with ditching shitty people.”

“He was pretty good to us for a while,” Steven said after a moment. “I mean, starting with a bunch of kids, and he came in and talked over the first contract with my parents and everything. And when people started dropping out, he helped us find Brad.”

Joe looked at his guitar, his fingers moving in a sudden burst of growling chords. Then he sighed and leaned over Steven, swinging the guitar back into its case on the floor. He crawled back to his spot, his raised eyebrow at the laptop screen burning into the back of Steven’s head, and flopped down on his side, back up against Steven, legs hanging over the end of the bed, hair spilling onto Steven’s keyboard.

“I’m taking a mental break,” Steven said. “Naked cheerleader group anal sex for five minutes for every hour I spend composing. It’s the whole rewards system.”

“You’re really not well, Steven,” Joe sighed. That mass of hair moved a little, enough to make Steven pick up his laptop and just balance it on Joe’s shoulder. It worked for one and a half seconds before Joe turned over, sending the laptop sliding over to the other side of him, and then went up on his elbows so Steven couldn’t reach around him. “I’m just saying—”

“I know he’s probably not any good for us anymore and anyway, it’s a shitty contract we’ve got and it’d be great if we could get out of it and into something better, but Peter goes back, okay? And I don’t know about you, but I’m—it’s not that easy.” Halfway through Steven realized he didn’t really want to get into the whole ditching-mercenary fight right now, especially not with Tom cranky one room over because of some fight with Terry, but he couldn’t _not_ finish the thought. He did try pasting a grin over it, because maybe faking it till it happened would just fucking pull through for once. “It’s the whole codependency thing, problems with release issue.”

Joe…was not buying the grin, at all, but he must have been feeling like he got all his asshole out with the earlier fight with Joey about whether he knew fuck all about managing either, because he just laid down again. “Yeah, we know you’re loyal as fuck, Steven. Nobody’s saying that that’s a bad thing either.”

“Yeah, because if I wasn’t, God knows where everybody would be now,” Steven muttered. Now that Joe wasn’t in the way, he got back his laptop. He glanced at the porn, then reluctantly closed that window and was greeted with the bajillion chat windows he had up. Tons of people wanting his opinions, tons of them, and tons of fascinating and way less painful conversations he could be having.

Steven sighed and put the laptop into sleep, then shoved it to the side. Then he pulled his arms up onto his elbows and smashed his hands over his face, wondering when all this fucking work was actually going to pay off. He certainly had never expected it to just happen for him, and was understanding of the dues that had to be paid, but like Shakespeare said, a pound of flesh was just plain sadistic.

“Tom will throw a tantrum if we don’t talk it all over together again anyway, so it’s not like you have to make up your mind right this second,” Joe said.

“Was that you being considerate?” Steven lifted his face enough to uncover his eyes. He poked Joe, who was looking at him with irate eyebrows, with his elbow, then laughed and spread his arms and flopped his head down between them. “Therapist two and three are going to be so _thrilled_ , man. They’ve been worried.”

“Everybody’s worried,” Joe muttered. “It’s like they all think I’m going to kidnap you.”

Not all of them, Steven immediately wanted to say, but if he said that, Joe was going to dare him to name names and Steven would have to come up with one. Hey. “Except you.”

“Yeah, well, so what?” Joe snapped. “Somebody’s got to be realistic.”

“I wasn’t—stop fucking assuming that I’m being a fucking asshole, because sometimes I’m not and you go and light the whole town on fire anyway. I just meant, _God_.” Then Steven pulled in his arm under his chin, using it as a stand to push up his head. He looked at Joe. “Not realistic to kidnap me?”

Joe’s naked first impulse was to tell Steven to fuck off. He let that scrawl all over his face, then looked down at the mattress, pursing his lips, taking a deep breath. The fuck off to Steven withered away, while the cool act came into play, Joe emotionally fucking off _himself_ instead. “Steven, you’d call in the fucking Army the first time we ran out of crayons.”

Steven had to laugh, because okay, yeah, good one. Then he sighed, very much doing his own set of comedy-drama masks. He ran his hand over his face again, pulling back the hair on top of his head, and then dropped that and dropped his head and got down there on the level with Joe. “You know, it’s a pretty fucking good thing we didn’t do this earlier. Because I’ll tell you something, Joe—if I’d seen that back at the Barn, you never would’ve went to London. You never even would have had a fucking girlfriend, man, because I would’ve figured that shit out for you and whatever the fuck hell else to make you see where you had to be.”

That cool façade, the face with smooth sharp angles veering off everything that got thrown at it, the detached gaze, it rippled up like somebody had tossed a rock into mirrored glass. Then Joe laughed, putting all his disbelief into that so all his belief could sit there in his eyes, knowing exactly what Steven meant. And then—and this was what was a little surprising, what with the man’s consistent ego and all—it was sitting there on the edge of its seat, teetering, actually not quite ready to claim its place.

“You changed my life. And I am absolutely not letting you get away with that,” Steven added. “You can try, motherfucker, but whatever the hell happens, whatever—whatever you do or I do or someone else does, you can’t take that back. You know it, too.”

“Yeah,” Joe finally said. He broke gaze because he was getting up on his arms, and when Steven saw his face again, he looked like he’d never had a doubt in his life. “Yeah, same to you, Steven.”

He was going for his guitar again. Hooked it up and laid it over his belly, getting all annoyed when Steven wouldn’t move to accommodate the fat end, and then just living with it. Shoved his arm right into Steven’s gut, but was totally fine with resting his head on Steven’s arm when Steven was actually, thank you, asshole, reaching for the laptop. And that was on purpose because he really put his weight on there, doing the concrete blockhead thing till Steven finally gave up and laid down and listened to him.

Sharp E string this time. Sighing, Steven changed goals and began wriggling his arm around to try and get at the tuning pegs. He got another prod in the belly and sucked that in and slid himself under Joe’s damn arm, too close to jab at now, asshole. “So now that that’s settled and I really don’t want to deal with management right now,” he said. “You need to fucking come down on the first verse, okay?”

Joe switched to slide, bringing up his far knee to support the back of the guitar. His brows jumped when Steven threw his leg over Joe’s other knee, and then again when Steven finally just pinched the tuning peg between his finger-joints and gave that a fucking wrench because _God_ , way to torture the one of them with a decent ear. “What?”

“When we practice again, and I can actually, you know, sing.” Steven’s voice cracked on the last word and he ducked his head into Joe’s shoulder to clear his throat, then remembered he wasn’t supposed to do that yet if he didn’t have to. He left his head down there another second, then moved it up till he could watch Joe bending the strings at the frets. “Because, Joe, you really, absolutely rocked my world, but there is more to being a band than just me and you, and your big over-blowing amps and your fucking lousy sense of pitch—”

“I’m starting to see what they’re talking about,” Joe mused.

“Fucker.” Steven hit Joe’s shoulder with his chin. “Anyway, turn it down so I can hear myself when I’m up there. It’s been a long time, you know.”

He didn’t think Joe was going to care, but the noodling cut out for a second. Joe just looked at his hands, not at Steven. He lifted his fingers all one-by-one, flexing them, and then went back to jamming. And grunted when Steven, grinning, leaned in to smack a kiss on his cheek, like he was annoyed, but like that was true when Steven started running his foot up and down Joe’s leg, just showing his appreciation for the lick and all, and Joe was the one who rolled them over. The guitar went down again and didn’t come back up for a good long while.

* * *

“I think next we should get you a doctor about that stomach problem,” Joey said, fiddling with his sticks. “Seriously, Steven. Even that drunk who always sits by the deli’s starting to worry about you.”

“Looking into it,” Laura said from the side. She and Brad and Terry conferred on something and then she threw up her hands in exasperation. “Well, the guy’s gay, so my boobs aren’t going to get us anywhere. Steven might have to just try.”

“Like hell,” Joe muttered. He and Tom exchanged looks, and then he leaned over the piano, bumping Steven’s head and shoulder with a water bottle. “Steven?”

Steven took another deep breath, way down to his center, trying to find his happy place and equilibrium and safe zone and whatever other buzzwords were knocking around in his head, and then straightened up. He ignored Joey’s question and just looked at the things in front of him. White keys, black keys, the fallboard. The microphone set up on the edge of top of the piano, because they’d consulted the doctors and had been recommended starting out with a slow song—hah, Joe—no shredding, no difficult notes, to just ease his throat back into things. 

Which was all well and good and sound advice, but fuck it, it didn’t feel right. Steven got up and looked around till he found his mike stand in the corner—he’d brought it anyway, just for moral support—and dragged it to the middle of the room, sneezing at the dust still left in the scarves. “Look, let’s do the other one first,” he said. He twisted up his hands in the scarves so nobody had to look at them shaking. “If my voice cuts out, we can at least work on the guitar end and finish cutting a demo. I still don’t have half the lyrics set for my ballad, so no point in wasting a chance, right?”

Brad started to say something, but Joe looked at him. Then Joe shrugged and went over to the amps, twirling knobs and all that. After a second, Brad came up and did the same. They had a short mutter about something about the solo before going to their spots.

“You sure?” Joey asked. He held up his sticks when Steven looked at him. “Just so you know, I’m not driving you to the ER.”

“Joe’s doing that, so you’re fine,” Tom said. He shrugged off Joe’s glower and looked at Steven. “All right, then…you better cue Joey.”

Steven nodded. He flipped on the mike, then gripped it with both hands, still trying to breathe right. Then he put out his hand. Took it back. Put it out again, caught himself just before jerking it down—Joey winged a caveman growl at him—because his breathing wasn’t in the correct pattern, and then just fuck it, fuck patterns, he just needed to fucking know and so just fucking _go_.

The drums kicked in, and then the rest of them, and then he opened his mouth and there was that last, that desperate painful twist, that snap in your head when you’ve just jumped off a cliff and you’re mid-air, hanging weightless, staring down so all the weight is in your thoughts as you realize just how far down you are going to go if it doesn’t work.

And then he was singing.

* * *

“Chain Reaction does still fit, you know,” Joey said. “It’s been just one reaction after another, setting each other off, and then—”

Steven shook his head, then shifted the arm he had propped on Joe’s shoulder so he could cross out the words he’d just written. “But it’s not Chain Reaction. That’s the thing. We’re signing a new contract and this is probably our one chance to change it, so I just don’t think we should go with a name that doesn’t fit the thing.”

“Okay, well, then I’ve got this one I’ve been tossing around for a while,” Joey said. “Since junior high, actually. Arrowsmith. How about that?”

“What, you liked that book?” Tom said.

Joey blinked, then shook his head. “No, _no_. It’s—Steven, give me that for a second.”

So Steven handed him the pad and Joey put it on the coffee table in the middle of them all, and wrote it down. _Aerosmith_.


End file.
